By Roshan Jayasinghe
Living This Moment
The first reflection in this series began by inviting me to look up, and it left me wondering about my place within a universe far larger than anything I could hold in my mind. The second invited me to look within, toward the quiet awareness through which every experience of my life has arrived. This third reflection began differently. It did not begin with a question at all. It began with something I have noticed about myself for many years and never examined closely, until now.
Friends and family often remind me of experiences we shared together many years ago. They speak with real clarity, describing a day at the beach, a conversation, a journey we took, and I listen with genuine interest, almost as though they are telling me about a life someone else lived. Sometimes the memory returns while they are speaking. Often it does not return at all.
For a long time I said nothing about this. There is something strange in realising that whole days of your life now survive only in another person’s keeping. A friend carries an afternoon we lived together, carries it in detail, and I carry nothing of it. If he had never mentioned it, that afternoon would be gone from me completely, and I would never have known anything was missing. I have sometimes wondered what else has quietly left in this way. Years of my life may now exist only as stories other people can tell me.
And yet, when I sit honestly with it, I cannot say it has ever felt like a loss. That is the part that puzzled me long enough to write this reflection. If so much of my past is beyond my reach, why do I not feel emptier? Why does my life feel full?
As I continued living with that observation, something else became clear to me. My life has never lived in my memory. It never did. Every one of those forgotten days was completely lived while it was happening. The afternoon my friend remembers was fully mine when it was unfolding before me. The experience was never waiting somewhere to be found again. It was fully lived, and then the next moment arrived.
That observation led me to a question I had somehow never asked in all my years of speaking about yesterday, planning for tomorrow and measuring my days by the clock and the calendar.
Where does life actually happen?
When I honestly observe my own experience, I cannot find a single moment of my life that happened anywhere except while I was living it. Every conversation I have ever had, every place I have visited, every lesson that arrived without my asking for it, and every understanding that quietly became part of me entered my life only as the present moment. I have never known life in any other way.
It also made me realise something else. I do not actually experience hours, minutes or years. I experience moments. Long before there were clocks, calendars or people to observe them, the Earth continued its journey around the Sun exactly as it does today. We noticed those repeating patterns and gave them names so we could understand them together. Those names help me understand and communicate with others, but they are not what I experience. I simply experience this moment.
The immediate past stays with me long enough to reflect on it, to understand it and to learn from it. Beyond that, most experiences seem to make room for whatever is arriving next. I do not know whether this is simply how my mind has always worked or whether living itself has shaped me this way. I have stopped trying to answer that question. What matters is what it revealed to me about where my life has actually been all along.
I have often heard people speak about making the most of life because life is short. When I honestly look at my own experience, life has never felt short while I was living it. Neither has it felt long. It has simply continued arriving, one moment after another. It is only when I look back through memory that I begin measuring it in years, and I have already told you how little of that measuring my memory allows me. I wonder if that is why the shortness of life has never weighed on me. Life feels short only when it is measured. While I am living, I am not living years. I am living this moment, and then the next one arrives.
There is one more observation that grew out of all of this, and it is the one I want to leave open rather than closed.
Everything humanity has ever created began in a present moment of someone’s life. Long before any invention existed, a human being was simply observing life and trying to understand it. What we now call science began as ordinary curiosity in an ordinary moment. Music, art, language and even the artificial intelligence of our own era each first existed as someone’s lived experience before becoming something the rest of us could share. Every achievement I see around me passed through a present moment in another person’s life before it reached mine.
Even these reflections began no differently. Before they became words, they were observations passing through my awareness, in moments that have already gone the way of all my other moments. Tomorrow I may understand them differently. Years from now, if my memory holds true to form, I may not remember writing them at all. That does not trouble me. The writing was fully lived. Someone else may carry it forward, just as friends have carried my forgotten afternoons.
When I look honestly at my own life, I realise I have never lost a single moment by forgetting it. I only lose this moment when I stop living it while it is here.
I have never met life anywhere except here.
Living this moment.
Author’s Note
Human Orbit in the Universe is not my attempt to explain the universe. It is my attempt to understand my own experience of living within it.
I do not begin these reflections with answers. I begin with observations, most of them from ordinary moments that quietly remain with me long after they have passed. Everything I write here is an invitation to observe alongside me, not to agree with me. Your observations will naturally be different from mine because your life has been different from mine. That is the beauty of being human.
If these reflections encourage you to pause, even briefly, and notice your own experience of living, then they have already served their purpose.
About the Author
Roshan Jayasinghe is a writer and observer of human systems. His work explores the gap between man made constructs and lived humanity, with a focus on how economics, trade and everyday choices intersect with questions of fairness, responsibility and inner alignment. Through essays for publications in The Morning Telegraph, he aims to remind readers that they are not passengers in a fixed machine, but active custodians of a shared world.
