A moment of your time…

Let’s do Heidegger differently. No dense prose, no mystifying hyphenated jargon—just the real thing: here, right now.

For whatever reason, we’re here—reading this. Let’s try not to overthink why (Heidegger would call that a “distraction”). Let’s look instead at where we are. Maybe you’re at a desk. Maybe you’re on the bus, staring at your phone. Wherever you are, I hope it’s comfortable—or at least on the way there.

Notice something: wherever “here” is for us, it already has a character. It fits with what we’re up to, and more broadly, what’s going on. Maybe this is a small moment of leisure at the end of a long day; maybe you’re half-reading while preparing for something else. You might even be looking for inspiration for a project (unlikely, but possible). Whatever the case, this moment belongs to what you’re doing. And what you’re doing is how your world is here for you.

And if you think about it, you didn’t quite choose to be here. Sure, you made decisions, but it’s as if the whole mass of what came before tipped forward and you slid into your chair or onto your seat, or to wherever you might be. Everything that led here is vast and vastly out of your control.

So: we find ourselves in a situation, characterized by what’s going on, and with the feeling that everything has somehow been leading up to it. Heidegger calls this geworfener Entwurf—thrown projection. (All right, I’ll sprinkle in some jargon now.)

One more thing: as you read these paragraphs, you may have been quietly directed to notice certain things—where you are, what’s going on, where you came from. The language itself staged a miniature event, what Heidegger would call an Ereignis, an event of disclosure. However you felt about it—amused, irritated, relaxed—that feeling was a kind of Stimmung, an attunement. You found yourself there in a particular mood, a way of being—what he calls Befindlichkeit. Such is the power of language.

You may also notice that we’re already moving on. Life is made of these overlapping moments—the previous one serving as a path that somehow meets us from where we’re headed. Perhaps, then, we could spend less time distracted by the language (and media) that provokes us to ways that aren’t our own, and more time with the tasks that find us—those that lead us, as if by grace, into green meadows under an open sky.