DELIBERATELY DIVERSE | Mitchell Drummond
“Deliberately Diverse” represents the opinions of Taylor friends who never completely agree about anything but enjoy diverse discussions.
We found the cancer in December and six months later we are in the midst of chemo and all of the really interesting side effects.
As soon as we knew it was lymphoma, I told Lisa that we were not going to live in dread, fear and worry of this disease but that we are going to live in the moment (each moment) and not consider the past and certainly not the future; really, life is too short. Overthepast10years we have picked up some ideas that have helped navigate the present moment, the one we live in every moment of our lives. Early on, we discovered the past and the future are not what we think.
Think about it; the past is only old photos and stories in our heads we keep repeating, they are not real and only exist in our minds. The future is just as nebulous; it’s just our expectations and they keep our minds off the current moment. It makes no sense, living in a future moment while ignoring the current moment, the now.
Our brains make it all fit together in this current moment of time that we occupy and we go about our happy way. The bottom line is, we only exist in the present moment; this is where it all happens and it is all we have.
That said, I would also encourage everyone to invest in their 401(k)s. You will grow old someday, if you’re lucky.
Another idea that has always intrigued me is the nature of reality. It’s a stupid question. It’s everything we can see, hear, feel and taste. Right?
Therein lies the rub. Everything we know depends on our sensory nerves to gather the data, create an electrical signal, deliver it to the neural system to filter, process and then organize it so we can understand what is in front of us.
We can only experience a copy of the real world in our heads; our brains are excellent virtual reality factories; they create a version of reality that closely follows the real world and feeds it to us as our reality.
We all have VR factories onboard; we live our lives in these virtual realities. It mimics the real world so well that we usually can all agree that it is what it is.
Interesting side note: How do we know that anything is real?
The answer is, does it kick back? When you stub your toe and it hurts, that’s real. Our VR world is combined with all the information we have collected over the years, conversations, the books we read, the movies we watch.
It is everything we currently know in our virtual world. A partial copy of the cosmos resides in all our heads. It does make you really appreciate what our amazing brains are capable of.
So this is the world I live in, this present moment; and this, I can do.
Drummond is a longtime Taylor resident and former City Council member.
