I have a feeling that it's part and parcel of being human that we are always ”waiting” for something.
I don't mean that in terms of waiting for the bus, or for a train, or for the alarm to ring... I mean we are waiting to get married, or we're waiting to retire, or we are waiting to graduate university, or we're waiting to start a new job or some other thing. The Big Stuff.
Regardless of what it is, it puts us in a state of waiting for something that is not here now. But we convince ourselves that it will arrive, in the future.
The interesting paradox about the future is that it is never here. It is actually an artificial construct that means little more than ”not now.” It reminds me a bit of an article read a couple of years back about an isolated tribe that actually didn't have any language to reflect time. They had only two concepts of time: ”now” and ”not now.” They also didn't have specific numbers, just the concept of one, or a few or many.
With all our planning, and all our goal setting, we don't really like to think of life in that way. We like to make timelines and have flow charts of our lives and it sets us up for a sad reality which is that we don't really know what's going to happen in the future. All we really have is what's happening right now.
And, somehow, we subject ourselves — mostly voluntarily, or certainly inadvertently — to all manners of suffering because we're so focused on things that are not now.
In many cases, people live lives in which the only thing that's happening now is the process of planning the future.
It reminds me of the infamous sign I once saw hanging at a restaurant back when I lived in Texas. It was a little chalkboard, on which an announcement read ”Tomorrow: free beer and BBQ!”
It caused a lot of chuckles among patrons of the restaurant because we all knew — from looking at the sign — that if we come back tomorrow the sign would still read ”Tomorrow: free beer and BBQ!”
But it's also a perfect illustration of the conundrum we face when we spend too much time looking to tomorrow. The risk, of course, is that we are so fixated on what will be that we completely overlook what actually is.
As philosopher Ram Dass famously said: ”Be here now!”
Some might argue that we are born that way... but I don't believe we are. If you've ever spent any time around very young children, you'll know that they are only concerned with what is happening in the moment. We are trained to worry about the future.
We call it "growing up." We label it as being responsible that we plan for the future.
Nothing wrong with that, from the perspective that maybe we need to store food for winter, or something equally functional. The wrong bits show up when we start making sweeping assumptions and declarations like we will "get to enjoy life when we retire," or we "will be happy, once we get married."
We make large chunks of our lives contingent on potential events of this abstraction called "the future."
If there's anything my decades on this planet has taught me it is that you just can't rely on the future... so you'd better make the most of the present!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful Friday!
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