"Tenses"
Hello and farewell to the remaining days of April. Now that spring break is winding down, let's get back to class—just for a moment or two and brush up on our grammar.
Oh no! Not that! Yes. That.
No worries we won't linger…
I want to use grammar as a framework for and reminder of how we so easily slip out of the present moment into a kind of magical thinking of "When
/Then" that allows us to leap to the future or bask in the past—those perfect / imperfect constructs that can be so tangled.
You know what I'm talking about. It's those moments that soothe us, distract us, take us
away from the task(s) at hand in our practice: looking towards the future with sunny optimism and hopeful imagery OR recalling the past that felt so much more welcoming than the present moment does.
Now here's the rub with these choices. Neither of them exist. The past is just
that—past. And the future hasn't happened yet. Plus—when we write a script for either tense it rarely is accurate. We invariably get the future wrong and we omit details from the past that made it not quite as lovely as we thought it was.
We can get so caught up in these
non-existent moments that reality takes a back seat to what we really want and creating that reality is hampered, delayed and shunted aside. This is not at all what we ultimately want, is it?
So then the question becomes, what is your relationship to "Tenses"
(2:34) and how do they inform you?
