Now is All There Is

Imagine a tiny circle of light in a universe of neverending darkness. What you see in the circle is the present moment in your life. Your life runs along a line from right to left. The right is the future coming into the circle, and the left is the past that has exited the circle.

This circle is like a small looking glass that shows you what is happening now. What you see in the illuminated circle is all there is; nothing else is real. Before it gets to the circle, the future part of your life's time line doesn’t exist because it hasn’t yet emerged from the dark. And after it leaves the circle, it ceases to exist as it is swallowed up by the past. It is gone and can never return.

Only what is in the lighted circle is real. The lighted circle is now, and it is all there is.

A Case Study

It sounds cliché because we hear it said, and we read Internet memes all the time that tell us to “live in the now,” or “only the now exists.” But although it has become trendy and trite, it is, nevertheless, true. I have been thinking a lot about this the past few years, and yesterday, as I sat on an airplane jetting from Brussels to Kyiv, it was solidly on my mind.

For the four and a half days of my visit to my daughter’s home in Belgium, my reality was the sights and sounds of the marvelous old house that they are renovating: the smiles and laughter of children who love me (and whom I love); a big, shaggy and gentle black dog; sleep-filled nights in a cold – yet wonderfully quiet – room; the sounds of spoken French and Dutch; a delicious Thanksgiving dinner.

What was not real was my life in Kharkiv. It was in the past and would return from the future, but for those days it was (almost) as though it did not exist.

But suddenly my short-lived reality in Belgium slid out of the lighted circle and faded into the darkness of the past, almost like it had never happened, like it had been a dream. My new reality at the time I wrote most of this in a notebook was my seat on an airplane and the space around me: the tall, young and attractive girl to my left on the other side of an empty seat and the strange old guy across the aisle in the row to my right who had all three seats to himself and took advantage to spread his meal across all three tray tables. More power to him! It was about the nasty guy behind me who kept pushing on my seat back and then complained if I reclined a few inches.

My “now” at that time was the whooshing drone of the jet engines, the ring of various aircraft alerts, and the buzz of passengers, punctuated occasionally by a crying child. It was the deep blue divider curtains hanging in front of me and across the aisle to my right. Outside the plane it was a blue sky above white clouds that had all turned dark halfway through the flight.

But even that was fleeting. The timeline moved again and the flight became lost in the past. Beneath the lighted circle now was Boryspil Airport, a crowded shuttle bus and a race to the passport control line. It was going through security again, and then boarding yet another cold shuttle bus for the flight to Kharkiv. It was similar to the reality at the Brussels airport, but yet it wasn’t the same; that reality had been lost to the darkness of the past hours before.

And so it continued. I was once again on an airplane, and all that was real was what surrounded me for that 50-minute flight. Then it was gone, and reality became snowy Kharkiv and a taxi ride back to my apartment.

Finally, the entire trip – from beginning to end – had slid under the lighted circle and run off into the oblivion of the past. It was gone, and once again, my reality was my apartment, road noise and neighbor noise, trying to sleep but finding it hard.

And so it continues. “Back to reality,” as they say. Today it was work, classes, and everything else that makes up my mundane daily reality. But that too will become just a memory one day soon as it fades into the past for good, replaced by yet a new reality.

The Nature of Our Lives

The now keeps shifting along the timeline of our lives, and only what is happening now is illuminated by that little circle of light. It is the only thing that is truly real. And each reality, each “now,” constantly fades out of existence as it is replaced by a new now. And it seems to me that as I get older, this process happens faster and faster.

Vacations really drive home how this transition works, and they also present us with a certain sadness over how the now can never remain. I touched on this in a blog post called, “Post-VacationBlues,” the final installment of my series on my “Dream Vacation” to Portugal and the Azores in 2016. I noted how during the vacation my regular life didn’t seem to exist, but once I was back in Kharkiv, the entire two weeks of travel felt like little more than a dream.

Like everything else, vacations move out of the little circle of light and speed off into the darkness that becomes the past. We remember that it happened, and we have photos and souvenirs to remind us. So, in a respect, it did exist – but it doesn’t exist any longer because it’s not the now.

In another post, “Life at the Speed of Time,” I also looked at how time just flies by faster and faster to the point that most of my life just seems like a series of dreams, sort of like movies I might have seen. The further in the past certain events, places or people are, the more I question whether they ever happened at all. Once again, I know logically that they did exist, but I understand that they no longer do.

So once time rolls past that little illuminated circle and into the past it stops being real, it just doesn’t exist any longer. And the future, likewise is not real, at least not until it reaches our little looking glass and – briefly – becomes the now. Plans, dreams, hopes, expectations: none of them exist, until they do. And then they too are fleeting and are soon consumed by the past.

In those cliché admonishments about “living in the now,” we are told to focus on what is happening at the moment, to enjoy it and to get the most out of it. The reason is that once the time has slipped past the small lighted circle, it is gone forever. Most of us really don’t focus on the now and make the most of it.

I have to admit that for most of my life, I have been too busy worrying about the future or fretting about the past to really enjoy the now. And that is my loss, because someday the future will stop coming. Someday, there will no longer be a now.

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Klass Has a Big Problem

Note: This is going to be more of a photo article than anything else. Since we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, how better to tell this story?

Klass has a real problem – with parking.

To be honest, all of Kharkiv has a problem with parking. In fact, all of Ukraine has this affliction. This issue stems basically from two things. The first is having way too many cars for the available infrastructure. The second is a “me-first” mentality among too many people here that says, “I can do what I want, and I don’t care about anyone else.” And the more expensive the car, usually the worse this mentality becomes.

For the unindoctrinated, Klass is a chain of higher-end supermarkets in Kharkiv. I suppose they are in other cities too, but I never go anywhere, so I don’t know. In the spring of last year, a new Klass store opened right across the street from my apartment building. It’s very nice and has everything I could need, although the prices are a bit steep.

In preparation for opening the store, they completely remade the parking lot in front of the building. The lot was expanded, nicely paved, and marked with plenty of parking spots, including 12 handicapped spots close to the store. They even included five special spots with recharging stations for electric cars. Besides Klass, this parking lot services a row of new stores that were built on the southwest side of the lot, and it also services some shops that had already existed on the northeast side.

During that first spring and summer, parking didn’t really seem to be a problem. People pretty much parked where they were supposed to, and at first they even honored the handicapped spots. But this didn’t last for long.

We Don’t Need No Handicapped Spots

Sometime last summer, a few of the “I’m too important to follow rules” types began parking in the handicapped spots. Why not? After all, there are no handicapped people in Ukraine, right? And once this started, the floodgates opened. Now the handicapped spots are often the first to be taken (and never by anyone who really needs them).

To make matters worse, because these spots are wider than the normal spots, it’s not unusual to see three cars take up two of these spots. And it gets even worse: sometimes a car will park with two of its wheels barely in the spot and the rest of the car extended out into the travel lane, making it difficult for traffic to move around it.

And this is made even worse by cars that crowd up to the front of the store – where there are NO parking spaces – and park so that they also contribute to blocking the travel lanes. This has been happening more and more since early last winter.

Another thing that happened was that cars began to park all day long in the travel lanes on the northeast and southwest sides of the lot. They reduce what should be two lanes of travel down to one on each side, making it almost impossible for two cars to pass each other coming in opposite directions.

And, of course the parkers don’t stop with taking handicapped spots or blocking travel lanes. They have occasionally even taken to hiking their vehicles up on to the sidewalks or grassy areas. Often they even block pedestrians' ability to get by.

Of course, there is a grand tradition of parking on sidewalks in Ukraine. You see it all over Kharkiv, and I understand it’s many times worse in Kyiv. Who cares if you block pedestrians on their own sidewalks? If they don’t drive, they aren’t important.

And remember those special parking spots with charging stations for electric cars? Well, imagine owning an electric car and coming to Klass for a recharge, only to find that all the spots are filled with nonelectric cars. Yep, these drivers have no respect for anyone or anything.

Why Has This Happened?

As I mentioned, Ukraine suffers from a lack of parking infrastructure. But even when sufficient parking is available, there are still too many drivers who will park illegally just to save themselves a few steps or perhaps just because they believe rules don’t apply to them.

But I think the bigger issue at Klass, at least from Monday through Friday, is that the parking lot has increasingly come to be seen as “employee parking” for a number of businesses in the area. Every morning, I walk along the northeast side of the lot on my way to work, and I usually walk the same route home. And I have come to recognize a lot of the same cars parked there every day. They are not Klass customers, they are using the lot for all-day parking while they go to their jobs. Sadly, I suspect that a lot of people at my company are guilty of this.

All of this extra parking chokes the parking lot and leaves a lot fewer spaces for store customers, the people for whom the lot was built. And it’s just plain ridiculous to see how the intended purpose of this lot – to service store customers – has been superseded by selfish dolts looking for free all-day parking.

At night and on weekends, it’s an entirely different story. There is plenty of space. In spite of this, people still crowd into the handicapped spots and in the area in front of the store that was not intended for parking. Bad habits are hard to change.

But Klass Does Nothing

What sort of surprises me in all of this is that Klass does nothing about it. They don’t seem to care about what goes on in their parking lot, which shows in turn that they don’t give a damn for their customers. Well, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me: no companies here give a damn about people, even their paying customers, and there is no such thing here as social pressure to do the right thing. And there is certainly no such thing as obeying laws where driving and parking are concerned. If they can’t make money on it, Klass (and the police) could not be bothered.

But this is where Klass is missing a huge opportunity. This parking lot has a single choke-point entrance that would allow them to completely control ingress and egress. It would be a no-brainer to set up a system with gates to control the entry point.

People could take a ticket when they come in, get it validated when they make a purchase in Klass or one of the other shops, and then use the validated ticket to go back out. It would be fast and easy. And they could even offer longer-term (weekly or monthly) tickets for those who are willing to pay to park there during the day. The price could be high enough to dissuade the casual parkers, and it would reduce stress on the available spaces.

What’s more, Klass needs to clearly mark those travel lanes and the area immediately in front of the store as no-parking areas. Then they need to pay for some real enforcement to keep cars out of those areas and out of the handicapped spots. Enforcement should have teeth: tow the violators away.

Will Klass ever take such action? Of course not. It’s just a dream. Assholes will simply keep on being assholes.

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Dying Alone

This evening is the end of a three-day weekend here in Ukraine. For me, that means three days of hanging around my apartment by myself, rarely going out, having nothing interesting to do and no one interested in doing it with me – almost no social interaction, save for a bit on Saturday.

Under those circumstances, it’s not unusual for my mind to go off in all kinds of directions. And sometimes, when I feel particularly isolated and alone, I get to thinking about my life here in this country and what would happen if the end comes while I am still here. It’s not pretty.

One of my first posts when I started this blog back in 2012 was called Living Alone. It was a partly humorous and partly serious look at the fact that I was living alone at the time and had been for quite some time before that. Seven years later, I still live alone.

One aspect of living alone that I did not touch on back in 2012 was what would happen if I had a sudden, serious medical problem in my apartment or out on the street somewhere. I got to thinking about it the past couple of days, and in that thinking, I imagined dying alone.

Earlier in my time here, I had a pretty wide circle of acquaintances, and I even had a few people I could legitimately call friends. And for years there was at least one person close enough for me to entrust with a key to my place and who usually also had contact with my landlord. That’s not the case any longer.

The last person who I thought was a real friend and who had a key left Ukraine earlier this year for a new life in southern Europe. The sad thing is that since she left she has not even tried to keep in touch. It’s like our friendship never mattered or perhaps never happened. That stings.

My circle has been shrinking for the past few years, and now it’s pretty much empty. I wrote a post about Circles of Friendship almost five years ago. In that post I described how each of us has several circles around us; on the innermost circle there are the closest people, and there are usually a few more circles with less-close friends, acquaintances, and finally just the mass of strangers all around us. I conceded that at time I didn’t think there was anyone on my innermost circle, and now I am not sure there is really anyone on the next circle or even the one after that.

No One Would Know… or Care

I am truly alone here these days. The reasons don’t really matter, but I suppose it has to do with age more than anything and probably also with ways in which I have changed in the past few years – and not for the better. I came to realize this weekend that if I were suddenly gone, no one would miss me. Days or perhaps weeks could pass before anyone might come looking.

I would be missed at work first, not so much because anyone cared but because it would seem strange after a few days that I wasn’t there to open my room for classes. But even then, I’m not sure how many days would pass before anyone got curious enough to try to figure out where I was. And even if someone did, there is almost no one there who knows where I live or how to get in touch. There is no one who has a key, no one who knows how to contact my landlord. There is no one.

And as for “friends” or acquaintances, there is no one who keeps in touch frequently enough to make a difference. Everyone has either left the country or just dropped me off their radar screens (admittedly, in some cases the “dropping” was mutual). There is no one who has a key, no one who knows how to contact my landlord. There is no one.

It occurred to me that if I had a heart attack or something here at home, that would be it. I would stay where I fell for many days, perhaps even weeks. And then what? When someone did finally find a way to get in and check on me, what would they do with my body? And what would happen to my possessions?

I don’t think there is anyone here who would know how to get in touch with my family or who would even feel moved to do so. I have no close friends here now, so the disposition of my body would likely be some kind of cheap grave and then quickly forgotten.

As for my possessions, the worst thing is imagining that my landlord would simply take everything of value – computer, video and audio gear, bicycle, cash, etc. – simply because he controls the apartment. One of my daughters has access to my U.S. bank account, but the money in my Ukraine bank account could not be accessed by anyone and, ultimately, would probably be kept by the bank.

Another Reason to Go

It’s not a pretty picture. And the more I think about it, the more it tells me that I should leave this place before it becomes a reality. Better to be around or at least close to family in this regard. Of course, things can happen to you anywhere – driving far from home, on a trip someplace far away – but at least spending the majority of your time close to people to whom you matter makes it better.

Of course, once you die, you have no reason to care about what happens to you or your stuff, right? You’re gone, and it’s other people’s problems. So it really shouldn’t matter where or how you die, or what happens with your remains and possessions.

Yet somehow… it does.

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