The Boundless Now
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Two of Me, Two of You - Jackson Browne
Topic: What I Believe

Traffic gets pretty bad where I live, and it's always my instinct to look ahead. I always want to see what the problem is, when it's going to break up so that I can start moving again. It's a natural instinct but one I have to be careful to guard against. Because when I'm looking ahead, I can't see where I am and will most likely slam into the car that's directly ahead of me.

My life is kind of like this. When money is tight or I have a bad day at work, it's easy to imagine a time when things will be easier, a future where I have a better job or the kids are grown, or maybe even just a vacation when I can relax and not have to deal with traffic or screaming kids or dirty dishes.

The problem is, of course, that the future isn't real. It doesn't exist and, no matter how meticulous and far-reaching my plans are, it's never what we imagine it to be. There's too much you can't plan for, too much that can go wrong, and usually does.

A friend of mine once asked me, when we were talking about all the stupid crap that we did as kids, if I ever felt guilty. There was a lot of opportunities that we missed and people that may have been hurt, after all. I considered it for a minute.

Feel guilty?

About something that happened in the past, that I can't do anything about?

Guilt and regret look backwards, the same way that fear and anxiety look forward. All of these feelings shift our focus away from where we are, and what we're doing, to things that don't exist or can't be changed. And if living in the past is a waste of time and living in the future is just plain stupid, at the end of the day I think either of these tendencies indicate a lack of contentment and even a lack of faith. They all say that our happiness lies elsewhere, in other times and places.

The Buddhists call this attachment. It's one of the Three Causes of Suffering. Likewise, C.S. Lewis once said that the Present is the only time that touches eternity, and he described Heaven as a boundless, eternal Now. To me these are all fancy ways of teaching us to focus on where we are.