In the white-washed world of western yoga (you see, I can't just simply say, "in yoga" because this experience can't possibly be yoga's purest form), there is a lot of talk about the present. I think this obsession with the present while we are on our mats is a simple overreaction to the times we live in: they are fast-paced, future-focused, and tell us to fuck our past. While I understand the importance of being present, it is equally imperative to make peace with our past and acknowledge the present moment is truly all we have as we work for the future. We must know and respect that our past has in some way informed our present, and our present will in some way inform our future.
These thoughts come to me with the start of a new year--a jarring time where one foot is in the past, reflecting on the highs and lows of another year passed, and one foot is in the future, creating plans that will never see the light of day. We forget that with one foot behind us, counting every embarrassing thing we said in 2017, and one foot out ahead of us, agonizing over every goal we've set out to achieve, we a little bit even out--we find ourselves in the center of our mat, the present. Regardless of whether we are still going to the gym five months from now, I think the biggest achievement is that we have taken a second to let our previous experience and future expectations jolt us into acting in the moment.
In some abstract way this balance of past+future=present mimics my feelings when looking at a Rorschach painting. Perfectly symmetrical, sending identical information to both eyes and both sides of the brain, but creating an entirely new picture had both halves been separate. Some kind of absolute lies in the middle of these famous works; the left has informed the right, and the right the left, leaving no longer two halves but one complete picture and a sense of ordered chaos.