Speaking of now. Having lived in and passed through some of the major cities of this world, one constant holds: people are in a perpetual rush to nowhere. Johannesburg, Washington, Geneva, Lagos. The pace changes, the faces change, the languages change. The rush remains. Purposeful, urgent, slightly ahead of itself. Everyone is going somewhere that turns out, on arrival, to require going somewhere else immediately.

I was with friends yesterday and the conversation turned to private jets. I was arguing against them, or rather against what they represent, and a friend offered the reasonable defence: if you have meetings in Tokyo one day and Melbourne the next, the jet is simply a tool. A practical solution to a real problem. I understood the argument. But I found myself saying something I had not quite thought through before I said it. If I am in a room with Toyota’s top global executives, I have already made enough money to have no urgent need to travel like that. The jet does not mean you have arrived. It means the race has simply upgraded its equipment.

Speaking of now, I think this is what now has come to mean. Hurry. Act now. Decide now. The moment is now. The phrase presents itself as an invitation into the present but it is closer to its opposite. Urgency fixes your attention on the moment after this one, on consequence, on what comes next. That is the furthest possible position from where you actually are.

I have noticed a different quality in certain people, older ones mostly, who move through a room as though time is making reasonable requests of them rather than unreasonable demands. When they are with you, they are with you. The conversation is the thing, not a waiting room for the next thing. I used to read that as a generational difference, the slower world they came from. I think it is something they understood that the rush had not yet taught me.

Speaking of now, I think the present does not need to be seized. It is already here. The seizing is what disturbs it.

A life conducted entirely under urgency produces a person who is always arriving and never there. Always about to be present. The assumption that presence is always somewhere other than here runs underneath the private jet argument, underneath the cities and the pace and the calendars stacked three meetings deep. The preparation for the moment becomes the substitute for the moment itself, and the cities keep moving, and the nowhere keeps receding, and everyone keeps going.

Maybe present is quieter than we have been led to expect.