Two Hours in the Future
I want to share a small piece from Oliver Burkeman's extraordinary newsletter, The Imperfectionist, that arrived in my inbox today.
"These days I’m pretty good at avoiding the trap that’s been called “onedayism” – the tendency to live as if the really important part of life won’t truly begin until you’ve reached some far-off milestone, like finding a long-term partner, or achieving financial security, or until you’ve fixed your problem with procrastination, or once world events don’t seem so apocalyptic. (You have to find meaning, accomplishment and joy in the midst of all that, not solely once it’s all been “sorted out”.) Yet as I’ve relaxed my grip on that sort of unconscious postponement, I’ve found it’s still easy to make the same error, just on a much shorter timescale: to proceed through the day as if my generally sane and interesting and enjoyable life can resume just as soon as I’ve got this task out of the way, cleared this batch of email, or made it through to this evening. But of course you can miss your whole life in this manner, ceaselessly focused on a point a few hours in the future, no less surely than with the longer-timescale version.
The answer definitely isn’t to beat yourself up for not yet having perfectly mastered the art of being present. (That, you might notice, is just another version of the same mistake.) But you can remind yourself to unclench a bit, to soften, to fall back into what’s really going on, here and now, and to see there’s no reason why you can’t find this very experience juicy and alive. I like how the entrepreneur Shane Melaugh puts it: “Your life plays out over your entire lifetime.” Which always includes now.
None of this is about attaining some kind of pristine, static, passive state of Presence In The Moment, as it sometimes gets presented in spiritual circles. You still get to pursue goals and ambitions and exciting future states; you can still look forward to the end of the day. It’s just that you get to experience all that as something that’s unfolding now, in a present moment that gets to count just as much as any moment that might coming in future."
The piece dovetails nicely with my next post which I should be sending tomorrow.
Cheers!
