The Future is Now

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” — Buddha

These past however many weeks—for me we are in our 7th week—that we have been “shut down” or “sheltering in place” have been more than challenging for most of us. We know that all kinds of things are on the rise: alcoholism, domestic violence, child abuse, depression and anxiety, etc. We know people are losing their jobs and businesses and finding they can’t feed their families or pay their bills. We know that people are getting horribly ill and are dying. Our kids aren’t at school, the elderly can’t have visitors. Some are horribly isolated and lonely, others are overwhelmed with taking care of everyone else in their lives 24/7. And so on.

Some of what’s happening is “out there”, happening in the world but maybe not directly to us. A lot of what’s happening, however, is in our homes and we are living it however we choose to live it. Some are taking it on like a challenge, others are avoiding or resisting it or resigning themselves to it and feeling helpless, many are escaping through distractions and self-medication, some are acting out against others at home, and some are even accepting it and taking the opportunity to do something with the time.

But most of what is happening is actually inside of us, believe it or not, and all of these external foci are merely distractions or ways to cope with what we can’t tolerate on the inside. We find ourselves wherever we are, and by that I mean what we are feeling and thinking, and we wish we were somewhere different. Perhaps we look back at the past and we mourn all the good times we had “back when life was normal and we were happy.” Perhaps we look toward the future, waiting for the “if” or the “when this ends and life gets normal and happy again,” barely making it through the today because we are so focused on the “someday.” Maybe we just wish we could go somewhere, anywhere, but there is no where to go. Many of us find ourselves confronted with who we truly are, how we really feel or act, and we don’t like what we find. So we fill our time, and our minds, with external things.

But here, and now, are all we have. In fact, the reality is that “here” and “now” are all we’ve ever had. The past has always been gone. The future has never happened yet. And “when we were”, or “when we will be” happy or normal has never really been a real thing. Life has always been up and down, normal and abnormal, happy and unhappy. None of this is different. And we have sat in places we didn’t want to be, experienced things we didn’t want to experience, managed situations we wished we weren’t in, countless times throughout our lives.

I admit, this is a big one and I don’t mean to minimize it. I myself am struggling during this time, hugely so. I find that my life has changed so dramatically in some ways that it is very hard for me to even imagine having the opportunity to do things that have “made me happy” in the past. I’ve somehow lost that sense of purpose or like I am making a difference, time for me to just be me, or to do something I want to do, or even to parent the way I want to parent. Just the “simple” act of parenting has become clouded because I must also now be a teacher to my young kids who really just want me to be their mom. I find that it’s hard to find happiness, even moments of joy during the day. When I find them they are fleeting, brief, and not what I was hoping for in my fantasy of my own happiness.

I see the news, and so much of it is focused in the future, the “what ifs”: the “second wave”, the potential food shortage, the collapse of the economy, etc. There are predictions about the “when we re-open,” the “return to normal.” There are time estimations—things could return to normal as soon as May 1 or never. The focus on the present tends to be just on the horrible things happening in the present: the deaths, the incidence rates, the rise in maladaptive coping. That makes it that much harder to sit in the present. What a horrible place to be, yes? And it may get worse? And it may never end?

Yes, much of the present moment is unpleasant and parts of it feel intolerable. But here it is, it IS the present moment, and it IS what is happening right now. There is no escaping it, not truly. You can temporarily relieve your awareness of it through distraction, alcohol, exercise, sex, or something else, but once that wears off, and it will, there it is again—the present moment. It’s following us around like a starving stray dog, except you might actually want to keep the dog.

So what do we do? Nothing. We stop all this doing, at least once in a while, and we just sit in it and allow it to be what it is. Here. Now. Happening. We feel it, as uncomfortable as it feels, without “doing” something to stop the feeling or to hold onto and wallow in the feeling. We let it be surreal, scary and tragic because that is what it is. Our attempts to numb or change that don’t numb or change it at all, it continues to be what it is even when we take ourselves out of it for brief periods of time. We do what we can to stop looking back with grief, and to stop looking forward with either foreboding or impatience. We just let ourselves be here, at least briefly, for moments of time.

The “reality” is that we have no idea what will happen in the future. We could return to “normal” life tomorrow and half the population could get the virus and die, or no one could. We could run out of food next week, or never. We could have a “second wave” and “third wave” and “hundredth wave”, or this could run its course and never come back. What we need to remember is that even though some of these predictions are based on good information and may actually be at least partially accurate, they are nothing more than predictions. No one making them has been to the future to see what it actually looks like and then come back to tell us. We. Don’t. Know.

So, as I ask my kids, who are 5 and 7 years old, constantly when they tell me they don’t want to go to college because they never want to leave us, “why are we worrying about this now?” Then I joke with them and say something like “I definitely think we need to worry, a lot, right now about when you go to college in 12 years. In fact, let’s worry about it every single moment of every single day for the next 12 years, let’s stop sleeping and stay up all night worrying…” by this time they’re usually laughing because they can see what I’m talking about. Then, of course I reassure them by saying something like, “You have no idea how you will feel about it when the time comes, and when the time comes you will make your decision based on how you feel then. If you don’t want to go, you don’t need to go, but wait until you get there to decide.”

So, everyone, let’s try that today. Let’s let today be today, and each moment of today simply be one moment. It will be gone in a moment anyways and you’ll find yourself in the next, different moment. Forget projections, forget catastrophic predictions about the horrors coming our way, forget hopeful plans for returning to “normal” as well as reminders that “normal will never be normal again,” and everything else.

We are here, now, and this moment is simply this moment. Be in it, accept it, and release yourself from having to change it. You can’t change it, and quite honestly, what a relief it is to stop trying.