The Present
- It's early March, and Dillard's on a road trip. She stops in the middle of Nowheresville, Virginia for gas.
- The boy working at the gas station offers her free coffee, so she goes into the office, drinks coffee with him, and pets his new beagle puppy.
- She thinks about how the puppy lives fully in the present, which leads to the pontification on the present that is Chapter 6.
- Ready for some serious Buddhist philosophy? Because you're about to get it.
- Remember how Dillard saw the tree with the lights for a split second in Chapter 2? We're revisiting that tree.
- When she saw it, she fully experienced the present.
- The puppy at the gas station experienced the present, too, but he didn't realize it in the same way, because puppies don't have the same consciousness as humans.
- Consciousness, says Dillard, helps us live in the present by giving us data for comparison. The powers of reflection and verbalization help us recognize the moments in which we fully live in the present.
- Self-consciousness, on the other hand, hinders our ability to recognize the glory of the present—when you're being self-conscious, you can't fully lose yourself in something.
- Speaking of which, she constantly felt self-conscious when she lived in the city. She was always stressed out and telling herself that next year, she'd start really living.
- So yeah, cram it, city.
- Another name for a lack of self-consciousness is innocence, a.k.a. the realm of children and puppies.
- Here's the thing about those present-moment epiphanies: You can't go looking for them; you just have to be there when they come looking for you.
- An example: When she got back on the road and continued her trip, Dillard looked up and saw a giant oak tree. Its branches were so high you couldn't even reach them with a ladder.
- However, the tree was somehow full of clothing. There were shirts and pants and underwear and baby clothes hanging from the branches.
- Why did she look up at that exact moment, at that exact tree, and see the clothing? Who knows—consciousness is weird like that.
- Back to the creek: It's early spring, the day after the patting of the puppy, and she's checking out how the water reflects the trees.
- She wonders how sycamores can grow in the woods, where their roots have room to spread, as well as beside city streets in Pittsburgh, where she's from. Once again: Nature is cool and mysterious.
- And now, for a meditation on mortality.
- Keep this one in mind for when you get old: What happens to our bodies is a result of our fears. Want to do cartwheels when you're forty? Learn to do cartwheels—don't sit around wishing you'd learned when you were a kid.
- Nature hasn't done humanity any favors, though. Insects and trees have hard outer shells to protect them; humans don't. We're way more vulnerable than your average bug, although we have less chance of getting eaten, so it all balances out.
- Humans, she thinks, need to stop worrying and fretting and failing to live in the present. In other words, get out of your brain and go find your trees with lights in them.
- A word about memory: Live water heals it. What's that, you say?
- Basically, it's like this: You might wake up thinking your life is over and/or you've seen everything there is to see, but if you go look at a flowing creek, you'll realize there's still a whole world to explore.
- In summary, "Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves." Nature is constantly renewing itself, and the present will always amaze us if we let it.