Making Effective Choices in the Timeless Present Moment

We use linear time as a tool — but the action of life takes place exclusively in the anatomy of the present moment.

Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA
9 min readNov 28, 2023
photo credit Grant H Brenner

Change Is Fundamental

Change is more fundamental — perhaps — than time. If linear, narrative time is at least partly a psychosocial convention, a social construction and consensus reality — then there does not have to be a universe which is billions of years old. That notion of linear time is conditionally-irrelevant within the moment. It’s a fiction, a story told by physicists. It may be true, it may not be true. Everything possible is right now.

Time is the language of change. Change is parsed into units with words and measurements — seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, eons. Other words for time are less definitive, reflective of subjective differences in the sense of the passage of time. “I’ll be there in a bit”, “It seemed like it took forever!”, “Give me a sec!”.

That things change moment-by-moment has a deeper reality than the mechanics of linear time because it is immediate and empirically observable. It is subjective, but we can mainly agree that something is happening right now.

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Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA

Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Entrepreneur, Writer, Speaker, Disaster Responder, Advocate, Photographer