Now
A child can use the word correctly by the age of two. Now I’m hungry. Now it’s raining. Now Daddy is home. The word does its job. No one has to look it up. And then a physicist tells you that two events you would call simultaneous — the lamp turning on in your room and a lamp turning on in mine — are not, in any absolute sense, simultaneous; they happen now for one of us and at different times for an observer moving at a different velocity, and there is no fact of the matter about which observer is right. Now turns out to be a property of frames, not of the world.
Then a neuroscientist tells you that the now you are perceiving is also not what you think. Light reaches your eyes faster than sound reaches your ears, and signals from your foot take longer to travel than signals from your face, and yet you experience the world as a single coherent moment — because your brain holds inputs in a buffer for about eighty milliseconds and then assembles them into a synchronized scene that it passes off to consciousness as the present. The now you live in is a confection. William James called it the specious present: a window of about two or three seconds that feels instantaneous because the part of you that would notice the seam is on the inside of it.
The contemplative traditions reached the strangeness from the other direction. Most cognition spends most of its time everywhere except now — rehearsing past arguments, planning future ones, narrating the present in real time so that the present becomes another argument. The Buddhist claim, repeated in many idioms, is that this is most of what suffering is: a refusal to be in the only place that exists. Sit and try to keep attention on the breath for five minutes. The mind goes elsewhere within seconds. Bring it back. It goes elsewhere again. The discovery is humbling and somewhat embarrassing — it turns out you have very little ability to be where you are.
Kairos and Chronos mark a related distinction. Chronos is clock-time, the abstract grid; kairos is the right moment, the qualitative now in which something has become possible that wasn’t possible a moment before. The skilled grappler waits for kairos. So does the comedian, the surgeon, the parent of a teenager. The clock cannot tell you when it has arrived, which is why expertise is partly the trained capacity to feel it.
What makes now almost impossible to write about is that the word has to do at least four jobs that should be different words. The physicist’s now (a slice of spacetime). The neuroscientist’s now (the assembled perceptual present). The contemplative’s now (the only place anyone actually lives). The colloquial now (the next thing on the agenda). They share a word and almost nothing else. Most arguments about presence and mindfulness and time-management are arguments where the participants think they’re using the same word and aren’t.
The instruction the concept eventually offers is small: notice which now you mean, and which one you’re actually living in. The four often disagree. The disagreement is mostly invisible until you ask. Flow is one of the few states in which they briefly agree, which is part of why it is so hard to manufacture and so unmistakable when it arrives.