All We Have Is Now. So Why Study the Past?

Searching immigration stories for the doorway to universal consciousness (I'm serious)

Elin Kjos had everything going on. A former elite swimmer for Sweden, she taught fitness classes, ran her own business, and felt great. She had big ambitions. She experienced life as a race, and she expected to win. After all, she always had.

At age 32, she received devastating news: The nagging cough she’d been ignoring for a year was caused by advanced stage lung cancer. She might have only months to live.

I came across Kjos’s TEDx talk this week – or maybe her talk came across me, the algorithm reading not just my clicks but my psyche. I had just finished another academic year, had just turned in Part One of my draft manuscript on Wilbur J. Carr and the invention of U.S. immigration law. Summery weather invited relaxation, reflection. But, as usual, I felt tugged at by something elusive – court deadlines, research commitments, yes, but something beyond that – something, I realized, called MORE.

Waking Up to the Now

Many of us – especially many of us lawyers – live our lives like Kjos before her diagnosis. Capable and driven, we have big plans, and we orient our lives around them, live for them. We may be pretty happy like that – but we’re also stressed, always focused on the future. Everything we do – even the things we began doing because we simply loved them, like writing or teaching or helping others – becomes a means to an end that always lies somewhere in the future.

For Kjos, the cancer diagnosis became her greatest gift, a wake-up call that she had gone through her life without truly living. Realizing intensely that each day could be her last, she chose to stay present in each moment, treasuring and savoring the experience of being alive. In her talk, given in March 2022, two years after her diagnosis, she acknowledged that she did not know how long she would live. But, she said, none of us really do. We all face the same choice.

The Present, the Past, and Individual Identity

Kjos’s message affected me deeply. The unease I had begun to feel beneath the work I love – practicing, teaching, and writing about immigration law – grew from an unconscious slip into treating the work as a means to an end. When representing a client, I had to remind myself as I do my students, we work hard to achieve a good outcome, but the purpose of the work has to be the tangible act of welcoming the stranger. If we lose sight of this we will soon get burned out, because we don’t control the outcomes. In the grind and routine of teaching, I can sometimes fall into the error of just teaching to reach the end of the semester. I have to remind myself that the purpose is to engage in a multi-generational exchange of knowledge about the justice system we care about.

But what about writing? Six years ago, I was surprised to find myself drawn as if by an invisible magnet to narrative legal history – something I had never even contemplated doing before that. It reanimated my work, both in immigration and in property. This passion for discovering and reviving the stories of our laws, the people who made them, and the people they affected now consumes much of my time. I love it like a child.

But Kjos’s message made acute a question I’d been dimly aware of for some time. When we accept that Now is all we have, past and future must fade in importance. Our individual identities – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are based on past events or social circumstances – become mere footnotes, lacking any power to define our wellbeing.

But if past and future don’t matter, why write about history? If identities don’t matter, why write biography?

Immigration Legal History and the Search for Universal Consciousness

Kjos’s message was a reminder at a time when I needed it, but it wasn’t an awakening. That happened one day in 2004, sitting on a fallen tree trunk overlooking a fork in the Cheat River in Monongalia National Forest. From that day on, past-conditioned narrative identities (my own or others’) held increasingly less interest for me. As national and global politics became increasingly identity driven, I became increasingly less political.

Yet six years ago I started telling stories, and something magic happened. Time disappeared. Boundaries dissolved. When I comb through archives and libraries in search of these stories, I have little conscious awareness of where I end and the biographical subject begins. When I write and share these stories, I seek to invite the reader into that feeling of nonduality.

Photo by Flavio Amiel on Unsplash

Once we experience the dissolving of the boundary between ourselves and people from the past, then we must conclude that separation is an illusion. Time is an illusion. And if separation is an illusion, then there is no individual identity, no immigrant, citizen, victim, perpetrator.

Why All This Stuff Matters in the Real World of Migration and Conflict

I don’t believe we can solve the migration crisis the way we’re going about it in today’s politics. Focusing on our identities can only lead to an instinctive desire to protect those identities, and protecting our identities only entrenches the conflict. If you believe “marginalized immigrant” (or even “advocate for the marginalized immigrant”) is who you are, who would you be if we fixed the system and your identity disappeared? You can see this on the other side of the aisle, too, in the current attempts of the Republican party to avoid any immigration reform legislation. Now that they’ve defined themselves as the anti-immigration party, a true solution to the border crisis would rob them of identity.

I think we can solve the crisis only by finding another level of consciousness – as widely as possible, as often as possible, for as long as possible. On that level, our individual identities don’t matter that much – but there’s a collective, a universal consciousness that matters profoundly. For me, discovering the stories of the past allows me to access that universal consciousness. Maybe it can for you too. That’s why I write it and share it.

Agents and editors keep telling me I won’t sell many books this way. They say only outrage drives clicks. Maybe they’re right. But I’ll take my chances and keep writing these stories. Because there’s something bigger at stake.

If this message doesn’t resonate with you, that’s okay. Maybe the stories are meant to speak to you in a different way. If it does, thanks for being here. And if you know anyone else who might want to hear this, please invite them to join us. You can subscribe for free by clicking the button below.