An infinitesimal life
Everything that is happening, is happening in the present.
There is no way for something to occur in the future or the past — it can only unfold now.
I’ve imagined a model of life that I call Infinitesimal. It suggests that the present is such a small fragment of time that we can think of it as dt, similar to how we represent infinitesimal change in physics.
Most of the time, our mind projects thoughts toward the future or the past. We build scenarios about what might happen, or we grieve over mistakes that already happened.
The thing is, our mind constantly escapes the scope of the infinitesimal now we are actually living in. We get caught in thoughts tied to memory, believing that the past truly existed as we remember it. Or we attempt to predict what’s to come and set intentions for what we expect to face.
We are like a particle traveling along a path — a point moving through a continuous line of events. I don’t believe everything is predetermined, nor that destiny is fixed. We can still change our velocity and direction along that path.
What I mean is that we can live a life where we become aware of every feeling, intention, thought, posture, and movement we make. This awareness — mindfulness — can only exist in the present moment.
“When walking, a monk discerns, ‘I am walking.’
When standing, he discerns, ‘I am standing.’
When sitting, he discerns, ‘I am sitting.’
When lying down, he discerns, ‘I am lying down.’” Buddha.
This illustrates how the discerning capacity of the mind allows us to live life as it truly is. We become aware of the discomfort in our body when sitting in an uneasy position, or we notice a thought entering our mind and simply let it pass through.
If we apply the same logic as in mathematics — where an integral is the sum of infinitesimals, and a derivative captures change within an infinitesimal instant —
then perhaps we can also observe our own rate of change.
Maybe we can calculate the derivative of a moment — to sense the speed at which our thoughts are moving — and ask ourselves:
Is this alright?
Maybe I should slow down.