I was gently coached recently to stay out of the future for just two weeks, during which time, I could see what would fill up the time in the now.
Spoiler alert: I did not succeed.
The thing is, I spend a great deal of my time living for my future and dismissing the now. This goes so far back for me that I can recall being in high school and having a concerned family member take me to a park and do his best to have an intervention of sorts. The point he was trying (but failing) to make was that I should live in the moment because my life would pass me by if I don’t.
I nodded as he spoke, but in my mind, I was likely wondering what play I’d be in that summer.
That conversation was probably 25 or 30 years ago, and in that time, others have tried to have the exact same intervention with me. Each time, I acted like what they were saying was important—but each time, I was deliriously lost in thought, planning for a future I could never fully grasp.
(Which is really the whole point. We cannot grasp the future. Even if we try really hard.)
This—living in the moment—is one of my greatest life challenges.
Mind you, it’s absolutely something I’m working on. I am a regular listener of Calm meditations (and sleep stories—especially the magical Tabitha Brown’s story, which I’m sure I’ve heard dozens of times by now and it somehow never gets old). I also try to do Tara Brach meditations a couple of times a week. And I eagerly partake in noticing and practicing gratitude on a regular basis.
(Seriously and truly, the amount of in-the-moment love I eagerly bestow on my darling dogs and cat is powerful and firmly rooted in the present. They are the actual best, and every moment I have with them is a true gift.)
But it’s almost like my baseline is to future-trip, so I have to work hard to bring myself back to the here and now. I do that a billion times a day. And I’m somehow proud of that fact. Because it shows progress … not perfection.
The truth is, we are so conditioned to be thinking ten steps out—and there is indeed a time and a place to be planning. But—as is evident by the fact that the conversation that person had with me in the park was so many years ago—time does go by in a flash and (not to state the obvious, but) if we are constantly focused on what’s next, we will absolutely miss what’s right here.
In the now-now-now, here are a couple of things going on for me:
Our dog, Lucy, has been struggling. It’s a long story, but the main points are that she’s old and senile, she had harmful bacteria in her teeth, and so they removed them. But Lucy has been handling the post-op terribly—like, really fucking badly. She obsessively paws at her mouth, so she needs to be coned, but she thrashes around because of how evil that stupid cone is. We’ve even had the, “Is this the quality of life we really want for her?” talk, doing our best to evaluate her current life and do the best to fix whatever the issue is. And then, last night, she got to her mouth before we could stop her, and that four-point-something-pound dog removed a fucking shard of bone (or tooth)! It was like a little knife embedded somewhere in her mouth, and despite the many, many vet visits we’ve been to in the past few weeks (and the X-rays she got), this was not caught until she removed it herself! That is our little self-advocate, our magical little Lucy. And, believe me, we’re reeling. This is still in the midst of unfolding, so I don’t have any great, grand endings to tell you—except to say that I believe we have turned some kind of a corner. I just don’t know what. And back to the Power of Now: if that little dog hadn’t self-advocated in this extreme way that it shouldn’t have come to, who knows what future (or non-future) would have been her fate? We just never know how things will shake out, and thinking too far ahead is very frequently laugh-worthy, at best.
We’re not sleeping. So much of what I’ve been able to work on in my personal and professional life of late has been the bare minimum. I haven’t gotten a head start on projects I wanted to work on. I haven’t done that coaching homework where I stop myself from circling around the same old issues. I haven’t reached out to my local friends who want to get a drink or take a walk. I’ve just been doing my best to take care of my and our animals’ most basic needs. Talk about the Power of Now. I almost wrote this Substack about the absolute dire need for sleep, but doing so would feel absolutely masochistic because I am not getting it. And it’s making me downright loopy.
The point here is that it might be completely dire for us to “stand in the place where we live” sometimes, and there is no shame in that. I’m (early) middle-age at this point—no longer that starry-eyed girl who was desperate to get out of her current life—and I’ve already lost people, places, and things that I never wanted to say goodbye to. We can’t just let our lives float by waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This profound Twitter thread is worth a look-see:
So I think the point here is that we can give ourselves permission to stop when we are managing crises. We can even give ourselves permission to stop when we aren’t.
And if, like me, your muscle memory is disconnected from the things that are currently in your best interest, be gentle with yourself.
There have been many reasons in my past why I needed to future-trip. At some point, that all evened out and my life recalibrated—and living in the moment became a beautiful thing.
I just sometimes forget that it is. Maybe it’s my PTSD. But whatever the reason, today, I’m actually feeling grateful for the opportunity to actively bring myself back to the moment—even if that’s a billion times a day.
I only wish Lucy’s pain wasn’t part of this particular story—or any story, for that matter. But I think she’ll be OK now. And I’m inspired as hell by her relentlessness even in the face of all odds.
xo,
jazz
P.S. Holy crap. WXXI featured Moore and me in a recent radio spot and article about our net-zero journey. I’m kvelling!
My focus on the future has to do with planning so i won’t make mistakes. Perfection is a booby trap.
new maxim idea (are we allowed to create new maxims?):
practice makes PROGRESS