As I finish university, my thoughts are frequently caught up with looking back at the last three years and looking forward to my hopes and ambitions for the future. I just came across the blog of someone visiting L’Abri, which brought back good memories of my time there and reminded me how much I’d like to go back for a longer visit sometime. Ironic then that one of the things I should read on their blog was this quote from Pascal’s Pensees:
“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does, so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
“If only we could be nostalgic at the time” is a quote from an upcoming Steven Moffat script, which he mentioned in Doctor Who Magazine. I think I have become more appreciative of my present moment, which is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed my final year at university so much, but it’s so easy to get caught up in dreams of the past or future. Another note to myself: I really need to get round to reading Pascal.
