Present, Tense?

It's funny how the rememberance of things past morphs with the passing of time. What you experienced, and what you remember are not necessarily always congruent. I've been spending the morning trying to digest this past summer and pondering the upcoming slumber of winter. It's got me thinking that our past is best viewed with a quick smile and a fond rememberance. It also has me thinking that contemplating the future is a fruitless task.

I've recently been re-reading Steinbeck's masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath". I last read it in high school. Although I remember enjoying the book, it was utterly dissected, discussed, and thoroughly ravaged in the hands of my motivated english teacher. My reading of it now, over fifteen years later, is so amazingly different and fresh, that I wonder if it is at all the same book. Which also begs the question, "Am I the same person?"

In the book, as the Joad's chaotically catapult towards the moment that they are to leave their Oklahoma roots and head to California, Ma says, "Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes, it'll on'y be one."

As I continue to read the book, the theme of living in the present crops up recurrently. Even though we probably discussed this theme to the point of nausea in my high school classroom, I don't remember it. I'm sure it didn't register with me then as it does now. I was looking forward then, now I look around me a lot more. Our perception and experience in the moment is all that really ever ads up to anything.