Livin in the Moment

How society has shaped us to focus on the future, removing us from the present and contributing to the influx of anxiety we see in present day society.

Why is it so hard to live in the moment? Is it society? I don't know about you guys but I personally find it immensely difficult to live in the moment. I am constantly consumed by what will come next: what internship I will have for the summer to come, what meal I will eat next, what my plans for tomorrow hold, what my salary will be in five years… It seems we are creatures of the future. We dwell on what is next to come instead of allowing ourselves to enjoy the present moment. If we are always preoccupied with what's next we will never actually enjoy anything…Think about that for a second because it's true. When we aren’t in the present moment we cannot possibly enjoy what is occurring in that moment. Our physical bodies may be in one place but our minds may be in a completely different realm or time zone (proving the fact that time is a concept that humans made to add definitive lines to society and that everything is occurring at once in the present…but let's not get ahead of ourselves, i'll save that conversation for another time lol).

I think, rather, I know a major part of this challenge is the pressure that society places on us from the moment we enter this world. In elementary school we are taught to prepare for middle school, middle school is preparation for high school which is preparation for college which is to prepare us for “the real world” whatever the fuck that means and once we get to the real world, an entry level job sets the premise for a higher level job and so on and on, but what if you want to change that path? We must begin again? . I remember my grade school teachers instructing us that if we hand in our assignments without a proper heading that we will be skrewed in middle school. In middle school we were taught how to prepare for highschool and the idea of choosing a career path was introduced. At 11 years old I was already being lectured about different colleges, I was told to take quizzes that were supposed to help me find a well suited career path. At 11 years old I was told to begin thinking about my career. In 7th grade I was rewarded for being on the honor roll with a field trip to a local college in which we toured the class buildings, saw the university dining hall, and peered into student dormitories. Society didn’t give me the chance to be present as a child, to learn skills to connect and play with others. Instead, I was consumed with the idea that I had to decide on a career. I was told and actually believed my grades in middle school would determine the trajectory of the rest of my life. I thought it is better to work hard now and set my life up for success. Ten years later I am still telling myself the same thing. Work hard now for a better life in the future. Not to take a pessimistic, dark turn but that future that I have been told to work for my whole life may not come. We don't know how long we will be living on this floating, euphoric rock in the middle of the universe for. From a historical standpoint humans are relatively new and we still have no fucking clue what our role is on this planet. Life is too short to stay consumed by the future, to focus on what comes next because we simply don’t know. We are in the now and this moment right here is what counts. Make today matter, follow your heart, try something new. I wish I could tell my young self that I am 20 and still have no fucking clue what I want to do in life. That planning every second of my life to the tea is only setting myself up for failure, because the earth is a place of disorder. What is meant for us to do will present itself in different forms. As the book the Alchemist taught me we must trust in the earth, trust in the signals that we receive because they are here. This is not to say we should sit around doing nothing waiting for success and happiness. No, We must still go after what we want and put in hard work and dedication but we also don't need to be planning our entire lives right now. Who knows what life has in store. Nobody knows or can control the trajectory of the world. We can do our best to put ourselves in a place of success but we really don't know what's to come. We don't know when the next shift in tectonic plates will cause a world altering earthquake that could rupture society. We don't know when our planet will no longer support the needs of humans. We don’t know when the next pandemic will cause us to spend another few months in quarantine. We can't control what the world has in store and that's honestly a beautiful thing. We could be having a horrible day and think the world is ending and the next day have the best day of our lives. Life is not a straight shot but rather a rollercoaster so let's buckle in and ride it enjoying and appreciating each bump, loopty-loop and drop that comes our way.