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"Live in the Now." I swear I have heard this phrase almost like a mantra for my whole life. It has slipped through the lips of therapists, pals, professors, pastors, rabbis and career counselors. I have seen it written, heard it sung, whispered and shouted. On the one hand it is sensible advice, and obvious as an October pumpkin in a flower-patch. On the other hand it is the most elusive of tasks, requiring a mindfulness that seems to slide out from under me given half a chance.
I got a call from my friend Binh yesterday, who is on temporary assignment in China. Binh has had an amazing and often harrowing life since he left Vietnam in a small boat with his family under gunfire from the Communists. He is a brilliant man, a monster-brain behind a computer. He is also a devoted husband and a father of a 6 year old son. Through odd twists of life we have become friends, and often turn to each other in times of stress. He is calling me because I emailed him about having recently been hospitalized.
We start taking about stress and how to manage it, about illness as a way the body gets immediate with us.
He tells me he is in a directional-crisis, unsure where to put his work energy – there are so many choices. He wants to feel useful, and has started a small business with a partner in Vietnam. But is this “the “ way? He is unsure.
Because it is his life, not mine, I see things more clearly. I see that he needs to simply let his life BE for a moment, to stop endlessly tinkering with it, to drop the anxiety about “right choices” and to just flow for a bit, trusting that his life will reveal its best direction to him. He is a hard worker, an endless explorer. Things will surface for him, as his intentions and spirit are bold and vigorous. “It is just about mindfulness, Binh. just stay in the now and pay attention.”
He laughs at me, calling me his Polish Buddhist friend.
But before I get prideful, I start laughing, knowing that any lesson I tell him about this is one that I should be learning myself.
Living in the now – what is that, actually? First it has something to do with the past, about not living in or out of the past. It means that I need to not cling to old hurts, not let them shape the way I see things today, not let them limit the way I can imagine a future. I must not let the past limit me. What was possible back then is perhaps only a pale shadow of what happens or could happen next in my life. Real life does always move in a linear fashion.
Which brings me to my favorite Time-Life-Flaw – living in the future. I am a “what if” kinda gal. If I do this, what happens/ If I choose that, what happens? What do I have to do today to get to the goal I have mapped out for tomorrow?
How silly is that?
My favorite joke these days is, “Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your five year plan!”
If I look at my life today, there is now way I could have imagined it as recently as two years ago! And it is so much better than I thought it might be, even on a great day! Even the rough spots would have been impossible to predict and even less possible to prepare for.
But I sure wasted a lot of energy trying to prepare for the unpreparable, and trying to plan for a future that didn’t have much to do with today’s happy reality.
I have struggled to find a kind of time line balance in my life – a balance that has me trustjng God, or the Universe or the self’s knowing --- rather than trying to will or control the future based on wounds from the past.
Yet we all do that, I think. We attach our feelings to some sort of contrived outcome, or we limit our horizons based on our pasts.
Then if you are anything like me you wake up a few months later wondering why things haven’t just moved right along. Well, duh.
My friend Andrew, who is my sanity-go-to-guy, or at least one of them – says that trying to
