If you're going to talk about living in the moment, living for the moment or even tell someone "in just a moment," it's a good idea to know what a moment is. Cheap definitions of "moment" are, well, cheap. One time back in school, a teacher asked me to define health. I said, "Freedom from disease." The teacher blinked at me approximately 5 times and said in response, "That's the worst correct definition I've ever heard."
Moments are where we live. They're an address we have in time and space. Example: "I'll meet you at Starbuck's at 10."
You also have to add in that moments are an artifact of human consciousness. Without people there would be no time as we like to think of it, only the order in which things happen. It's true that seconds, minutes, hours et al reflect our world but really they reflect our relationship to our world. Dividing up the day into 24 equal segments at one point served someone's purpose. The rest of us picked it up because our parents enforced it.
I'll assert that most of our moments seem to be spent pondering or worrying about other moments. We often fret about the unchangeable past in the hope that our fretting will help us control our future.
One exception to this is entertainment. Entertainment happens in time and space and pretty much requires us to at least pay some attention if it's going to serve the purpose we implicitly assigned to it by sitting down and watching or listening. It pulls us into the current moment.
I would submit that the invention of writing first made entertainment repeatable and made it such that other people weren't required to be present for us to experience entertainment. Before writing about all you had were traveling poets and minstrels and when they left, so did your entertainment. With writing, you could pick up a tablet, papyrus or scroll anytime you wanted and read all the silly stuff that the great kidder Euripides wrote. Actually, he wasn't much of a kidder. We know that because even though he's been gone for a few millennia, we can still know at least something about him by his writing. I never had a relationship with Euripides but I do know he wasn't particularly funny.
Entertainment requires less and less immediate relationship all the time. I think it's safe to say that everyone who reads this space has some sort of relationship with me. That's unusual. Most people who blog don't know most of their audience and never ever will look them in the eye. I have at least a couple friends that I wouldn't know at all if it weren't for the internet. That's good. It would be better to go to a meal with them but I'd much rather know them digitally than not at all.
As information becomes more and more accessible, the need for relationship as an information transport mechanism becomes less and less important. And as we become more and more dependent on information, we tend to value it correspondingly over relationship. That is, we'd rather fill our moments with information of our own choosing or in maintenance of our needs and wants.
I think this necessarily leads to the point where fewer and fewer of our moments are spent in relationship and more moments are consumed by entertainment in all it's forms. And I think that is a kind of narcissism...of which I might personally be a bit guilty.
I have been working for awhile in the direction of opening myself to more and better relationships. And even though everyone's moments seem pretty consumed, I'm going to keep chipping away. And that's because in the end, the best moments for all of us are the one's that we share with each other and with our God. Relationships feed us and give us the fellowship of others. Information is just information.
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