We live in the here and now, though usually not deliberately or fully. When we do bring ourselves fully into the present, we may find a truer reality and can leave our illusion of self behind. Or so we’re told. But what about the past and future? We may not live in the future right now, but we will in a moment. And our past will be coming along.

I came across a passage about all this in a book where I least expected it. In Noah Hawley’s mystery Before the Fall, Gil the body guard prepares for night duty in the house of the rich and famous family that he works for.

To be a body man did not mean being in a state of constant alarm. In fact it was the opposite. One had to be open to changes in the way things were—receptive to subtle shifts, understanding that the frog was killed not by being dropped into boiling water, but by being boiled slowly, one degree at a time. The best body men understood this. They knew that the job required a kind of tense passivity, mind and body in tune with all five senses. If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.

nasa.gov

In living this way, a sense of anticipation can evolve, the voodoo pre-knowledge that the wards you are watching are going to do or say something expectable. By being one with the universe you become the universe, and in this way you know how the rain will fall, the way cut grass will blow in fixed starts in a summer wind. You know when [the mother and father] are about to fight, when the [daughter] is getting bored, when [the four-year-old son] has missed his nap and is going to melt down.

You know when the man in the crowd is going to take one step too close, when the autograph fan is, instead, looking to serve legal papers. You know when to slow down on a yellow light and when to take the next elevator.

These are not thing you have feelings about. They are simply things that are. (260-1)

We are, I think, guards of our bodies.  We try to “live in the moment, fluidly” in order to remain “open to changes in the way things are—receptive to subtle shifts.” When I meditate, I used to push away the voice in my head that distracted me with sound bites from the past and clever words for the future. But I’m more comfortable now when that voice intrudes. I hear it as my own body guard reporting in with another piece of the “voodoo pre-knowledge” that he gleans from living in the here and now in the first place.