Present moment how long?

It is recommended that we should withdraw the tentacles that flail in second hand time and thus dwell peacefully in the present moment. But how long is the present moment?

The range of possibilities is from about a nanosecond to billions of light years. But few people operate at the ends of that kind of scale.

At a more human level there are the moments of conception, birth, life and death – the legendary three score and ten. But few people think in those terms.

Some people can be in a condition of ‘no-self’ where clock time is replaced by felt time. Day dreams, dwams and desperations. Time can seem to drag or to flash past.

But, in the end, common sense suggests that present moments last for anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. Thoughts and feelings enter the attention centre, hang around for a while and then leave. And they are quickly replaced by other thoughts and feelings generated from the vital churn of the unconscious. There is an ongoing rehashing of happy or sad stories from the past and about the future.

This raises a conundrum. If the goal is to write about what is going on in my mind in the present moment then I will write about writing, about my fingers interacting with the keyboard and sometimes with the wax in my ears.

This article is an example except that there was some timeless working of lists.

And that last sentence is an example of intellectualizing in terms of seeing patterns.