Looking Back

 I had lunch the other day with a friend in Chattanooga at the Pier 88 restaurant. I like Pier 88. Their specialty is hot boiled shrimp. You're served a plastic bag containing shrimp and some of the liquid the shrimp were boiled in, a plate for the shells and a large bib. I never order that item. I prefer cold shrimp dipped in a tangy sauce. And I don't like the greasy face that is unavoidable when eating from the bag. It lacks dignity. That's the same reason I don't order cuy (guiney pig) in Peruvian restaurants. It's served whole including the head and oozes with grease. The head is left on to show you that it's not a rat. Or so I've been told. And the skin is so thick and tough that it could be used to replace the metal on booster rockets shot into space.

I order the fried tilapia basket. Pier 88 does great fish. The meal includes fries, cole slaw and either two or four tilapia fillets. Two is not enough for me so I order four, and then complain for the next hour when I have that bloated feeling. 

During lunch we were talking about shopping and how different it is today, and how Internet buying has had a devastating effect on brick and mortar businesses. We were recalling how many businesses from the old days were gone. I told of how my mother would send me to the corner grocery store...Lindner's Groceries really was on the corner and right next door to our house. She'd give me 25 cents with the instruction to get some lunch meat for dinner. Emil, the butcher (most grocery store owners cut their own meat and wore a long white apron so were always called butchers) knew that my mom wanted equal amounts of liver sausage and bologna so he would start slicing the meat while asking me how school was going. I'd walk out of that shop with a paper bag containing a hefty amount of sausage. It was always liver sausage and bologna. There was an old joke about a woman who walked into a grocery store and said, "Give me 25 cents of lunch meat, easy on the boiled ham." Boiled ham was over fifty cent per pound. Nobody in our neighborhood ate that.

Sitting there in Pier 88 I guess I was talking almost non-stop when my friend interrupted me by saying, "Tom, you're living in the past." Her comment was not meant as criticism but as understanding. The conversation switched to what each of us was going to do with the rest of the day and then we went on our separate ways. But I didn't forget her comment about me living in the past.

What does living in the past mean? Is recalling the past the same as living in it? It seems to me that I'm living in the present, though I do spend a lot of time thinking of and enjoying the past. After all, I'm 82 and the vast majority of my life is in the past. That thought led to my wondering, what does living in the present mean? Is there a present? The question that I just typed now is in the past, isn't it? If the past and present are nebulous, what can be said about the future?

Albert Einstein said, "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly held illusion." The noted theoretical physicist Sean Carrol has seriously posed the question, "Why can't we remember the future?" I'm not going to say that I understand what the two of them are getting at but it seems to me that they're saying that time exists without past, present and future and that time doesn't flow, though Carrol talks about the "arrow of time", seeming to indicate that time has direction. It's hard to make sense of it, though in the end I think it doesn't matter what labels - past, present or future are placed on time. We're here, we exist at this moment and that's the name of that tune. 

For practical purposes we have to recognize that there was a yesterday, there is a present, though the boundaries we place on the present (a minute, hour, day, week, month) are of our own choosing, and there will be a future. The future is important, especially if you're young. If there is to be any sort of quality life, the future has to be planned for. Goals have to be defined and plans to accomplish them need to be formulated. Those are not small nor easy tasks. For better or worse, people my age and older don't have to be concerned about planning for the future. In fact, I don't have any concept of what planning for the future means at my age. All of life's milestones have been passed. There is nothing major remaining that needs to be planned for. The trips to Rome and Egypt that I always meant to take but never did seem now to be trivial. I could still do them but I've been to many places and have learned that people are people and places are places no matter where you are; it's just that the color and flavor is slightly different. I think the same can be said for most experiences in life. 

What it comes down to is this: if enjoying a good meal with friends in a restaurant and talking about the good old days...if taking a quiet walk in a park with Maribel and enjoying nature while talking about a past event is "living in the past", then I am perfectly content with the present and whatever future remains to me.

I thought I was done with this post, until it occurred to me that it may appear that I have assumed that all older people share or should share my point of view about a limited future. I didn't take into account those with a religious belief. I'm not talking about the window-dressing-going-through-the-motion folks....those who have never given any thought as to why they believe. I mean the theists' with a sincere heartfelt religious belief. For those people the future is unlimited; death is a step to something greater. I don't have a religious belief. If a label has to be put on my viewpoint, I am an atheist. 

Before I go any further with this, let me explain my flavor of atheism. If I'm going to believe in something, I want facts, concrete evidence. Regarding a supreme entity, the existence of a god has never been proven, and I can't disprove it, so because I can't disprove it I have to allow the possibility that a god or something of that nature exists. Note that I said possibility. Though something may be possible, the questions remains is it probable, and after a decade of off and on exploring religion in my early days I concluded that the probability of a supreme entity existing is near zero. That conclusion remains to this day.

In those early days of exploration I would often get involved in religious discussion, and occasionally I would be asked how I became an atheist. I would usually respond by telling them that they were asking the wrong question. We are all born atheists. Many people acquire a religious belief through the influence of parents, friends, institutions, culture, customs and social pressure. Some of us do not. So the correct question is why didn't I acquire a religious belief? I have many answers for that question, and also opinions as to why religious belief continues, but that's an issue for another day.