The Line on the Paper: Why the Present Is the Only Place Where You Actually Live

This post is not a forensic analysis, not a polemic, not a dissection of a broken world. It is something different, and I say that not as a formality but as an honest warning to myself, because I almost exclusively write about things that go wrong. It came into being in a forest, at dusk, with a Malinois as my only audience and no mobile signal for kilometers in any direction, and it was triggered by a series of images I saw on social media over the past few days, images I want to come back to toward the end.

Yesterday evening I walked with Bandit through the forest. Not the friendly Sunday-afternoon kind with signposted trails and rubbish bins every 200 meters, but the other one, the sort where GPS gives up after a few minutes, where the phone is nothing but an expensive torch, and where you can genuinely lose your way if you do not know how fir trees smell at dusk when you are approaching from the north. Bandit knows. In those situations I trust him completely, because he is the only one in my immediate vicinity who never makes trouble and never lies.

While we walked, I thought. I always think when I walk, but this time it was different, and I only noticed the difference after a while, when the trees grew denser and the last mobile signal disappeared from my phone. I was not thinking about a case, not about an expert report, not about a broken institution or about what people do to one another. I thought about the women at the checkout in my local supermarket, who know my name, who know what I do for a living, and who still always have a friendly word ready, perhaps because of that, perhaps despite it. I thought about the people in my clubs, whom I have been asking the same question for years, how they are really doing, and who usually give me the honest answer rather than the polite one, because they seem to have sensed that I actually want to know. I thought about 2 friends I have lost in recent years, one who was a little older than me, one who was considerably younger, both with plans, both with tomorrow firmly in their sights.

Tomorrow did not arrive for either of them the way they had imagined.

Take a Piece of Paper

I will do this with you now, directly and without lengthy setup, because it is so simple that it almost seems suspicious, and because I believe the simplest things are usually the most effective ones.

Take a piece of paper. Draw a line, horizontal, left to right, as long as you like. Exactly in the middle, place a dot, and that dot carries a single date: today, this hour, this breath, this moment in which you are reading these words while something outside is happening that you cannot control anyway.

Open the interactive timeline

Everything to the left of that dot is your past. Everything to the right is your future.

Look at the right side. The further you look to the right, the more space you give that line, the more room you create for fear, for the question of whether you will still be healthy in 30 years, whether the money will hold out, whether the plan will work, whether you will have arrived in time before someone tells you that you have arthritis and a second heart attack behind you, and that traveling has become rather too strenuous now. The longer that line stretches to the right, the more space it offers for scenarios that may or may not come, but that do not yet exist, not today, not in this moment.

Now look left. The further you look to the left, the more space you give the past, the more room you create for pain, and Homo sapiens is, this is not an insult but an observation about our species, a poor archivist of his own history. He reliably remembers the traumas, the mistakes, the moments that hurt, while the good moments fade faster, which is not a question of character but neurobiological reality, built into our brains for evolutionary reasons that unfortunately have very little practical use in the modern world.

What remains is the dot in the middle.

What the Dot in the Middle Contains

In this moment, right now, you are in all likelihood not in acute distress. You are reading this text, you are breathing, your heart is beating, you have water and you have food, and most of us, if we ask ourselves honestly how we are doing right now, in this second, have to admit: we are well enough.

That sounds like something grandmothers say before the guests leave, and that is precisely why we tune it out every day, because truths that require no expertise carry very low market value in our society. Nobody pays anyone to tell them to live in the present, so it cannot be particularly valuable, that is the implicit logic, and it is wrong.

The fear of the future and the pain over the past are both real, I am not disputing that, and I have no reason to, because I know both. But they exist in the mind. The hunger exists in the stomach. The pain in the shoulder exists in the shoulder. The present is the only place where anything actually happens, and paradoxically it is the place where we spend the least time, because we are either mourning the past or dreading the future, and the narrow strip of present between the two disappears in that noise almost every time.

I have observed this in myself, very closely, over many years. I am someone who, by profession, lives inside other people's pasts, in data, in traces, in what remains when someone is gone or when something has gone wrong. That has a price, and the price is that at some point you have to learn to actively defend your own present, not as a romantic gesture but as a necessary form of hygiene.

Two Men I Miss

I will not give names, that would not be appropriate, and it is not necessary.

One of them was 2 years older than me, someone who had planned his retirement in detail, where he would travel, what he would finally read, how he would wake up in the mornings without an alarm, without pressure, with the feeling that time now belonged to him. He did not live to see that retirement, because life does not keep a calendar and because a diagnosis arrives faster than a plan.

The other was younger than me, considerably younger, and he had the feeling that so many of us know, namely that there is still plenty of time, that the things that really matter will get done once the other things are taken care of, once the stress eases up, once the children are older, once the next project is finished. That feeling deceives, and it deceives everyone, regardless of age, regardless of health, regardless of everything one thinks one knows.

I say this not to create fear, the opposite is my intention. I say it because in those losses, which genuinely hurt and still do, I understood what Alan Watts meant when he said that yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is not a quote for motivational calendars, that is anatomy, and anyone who dismisses it as a calendar quote has probably not yet lost someone who should not have had to go.

The question is not whether we die. The question is whether we have lived before that.

The Bavarian Forest and the Quiet Inside It

Back to the forest, where this thought began and where I eventually let it go again toward the end of that long walk, not because it was wrong, but because Bandit started pulling in a direction that meant we should turn around, and you do not ignore a Malinois on questions like that.

There is something peculiar that happens when you walk through dense coniferous woodland without a phone signal and the only contact with the outside world is an animal holding his nose into the wind with no agenda whatsoever. You stop planning, you stop running scenarios, you navigate, you smell, you watch where the ground softens and where the roots are, and you are, out of pure necessity, completely here. That is not a spiritual state and not a meditation technique, it is simply the response of the body to a situation that demands its full attention.

And it is the best thing I have given myself in a long time.

I know that life holds surprises, that there are moments when the body signals that not everything is in order, and that one then has to make decisions that nobody else can make for you. I have experienced such moments, and I have learned from them that you need to know yourself before you decide, and that the present is the only place from which you can decide at all. Anyone who is living in the future or the past when the moment of decision arrives is deciding from the wrong room.

What Alan Watts Actually Meant, and What Has Been Made of It

Over the past few days I came across a series of images circulating on one of those networks, well designed, calm colors, plain typography, and they were about Alan Watts, about his thoughts on money, time and the ego, packaged into short slide sequences for people scrolling between two appointments.

I read these images with a certain goodwill, because the intention behind them is clearly good, and at the same time with the feeling that something essential had been lost along the way. Watts did not leave behind a bullet list. He wrote books, more than 25 of them, and he gave talks, and his central idea was not that money is evil or that the ego is the enemy, but that we make a fundamental mistake when we confuse the symbol with the thing itself, the tool with the goal, the map with the territory.

That mistake is real, and it is widespread. You slave away at a job you hate to buy things you do not need to impress people you do not even like, and while doing so you wait for a future happiness that does not exist in that form, because happiness is not a destination you arrive at but an orientation, and orientations cannot be deferred to a later date. Watts said that, he said it again and again, and he was right.

What gives me pause about the slides is not the content but the packaging. True wealth means health, mental presence, love, freedom in the mind: that is what it says, and it is true. But when the same insight that Watts developed over years of lectures and books is compressed to 4 lines per image, it loses something that is difficult to name but easy to feel. It loses the friction. It loses the resistance that Watts himself always maintained, because he was not trying to give simple answers but to ask uncomfortable questions.

Less attachment, less chasing, more being: that is also true, but it is easier said than lived, and anyone who believes they can tick that off by saving a screenshot has read Watts the way someone reads a menu and believes they have eaten the meal. I say that without mockery, because I think the people who share these images are mostly sincere in their intention. But the distance between understanding a thought and actually living by it is long, and in my experience it often runs through a forest without mobile reception.

What You Can Do Today, and I Mean Actually Today

I am not a life coach, and this is not a self-help book, although my book about the hamster wheel is currently being written and contains some of this in more extended form and with somewhat less evening-walk atmosphere. But I can tell you what helps me, directly and without detours.

When a negative thought about the past surfaces, and it does, that is human, and it would be strange if it did not, I do the following: I close my eyes briefly, I visualize the thought as something tangible, a stone, a box, a shape, and then I build, brick by brick, a wall in front of it. Not to suppress anything, but to decide that this particular thought does not get access right now, because I do not need it, because it changes nothing, and because it pulls me away from the dot in the middle where I want to stay. It exists, it may exist, but it does not govern.

That works, not always, not immediately, and it takes practice like everything that is worth the effort.

The fear of the future is harder, because it disguises itself as reason and comes with good arguments. It whispers that planning matters, that provision matters, that you need to stay on top of things, and all of that is true, I am not disputing it. But preparation acts in the present, it is action, it is concrete, it changes something. Fear, by contrast, is mostly speculation dressed up as common sense, and it changes nothing except the feeling in the stomach that is still there the following morning.

My 2 friends deserved to have made that distinction. I hope you still can.

The Dot in the Middle Holds

This post is, I repeat it at the end because it matters to me, not an expert report, not proof of anything, no diagnosis, no indictment. It is an observation from a forest, at dusk, from a man who has spent decades working with the remnants of other people's decisions and has learned, in the process, what remains and what does not, what actually counts and what turns out, on closer inspection, to be an illusion.

What remains is the dot in the middle.

What does not remain is everything you planned instead of living.

Bandit grasped that long ago, without Watts, without images on social networks, without books. He walks, he smells, he navigates, he is here, completely and without reservation. I am still learning, after all these years, and that is perfectly fine.

References

• This post is based exclusively on the author's personal observations and experiences.
• Interactive graphic “The Line on the Paper” by George A. Rauscher, designed and coded in April 2026.