If you ever read my blog archive, you'd find that there are three or four posts with the same title, mostly wrestling with whether I need to live in the present or plan with the future in mind. The wrestling has always been taking place in the back of my mind, even when I don't write about it, but for the past 3-4 months, it has settled a lot toward focusing on the present. Wise words from a kurta-clad friend helped me feel at peace with this new development.
If you've read/watched the "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior", (and if you haven't, I strongly suggest you do) you'd remember the philosophy of 'staying in the present'. Everything that matters is right now. Obviously, I fell in love with the philosophy when I heard it and some of you who know me would say that I tend to go overkill this one. I have always felt an existential ease with the process, and I have been the most productive when I am at peace with the uncertainty of the future, and even now, I feel that I may not have many regrets, if I get the chance to grow old and look back at my life.
But even when I make it my purpose to work one day at a time, there are times I tend to get thrown off this philosophical horse. Mostly it's because of the overflowing emotions that I am learning to control. The first one is obviously panic. When I suddenly lift my eyes toward the future and have the swirling mist blind me and the well-meant yet discourgaging voices of those I trust and respect, I tend to lose focus on the present and begin to worry about the tomorrow, and at the end of the day, get frustrated with how I've handled the past, leading to this horrible vicious cycle that throws me into this rut making me unproductive and useless.
The second, and more subtle (and therefore more vicious) way I lose control is to count chickens. When everything is going right with the present, I guess it's human nature to project the graph toward the future and imagine the future. The future; what was once a misty void now seems to be a paradise. The danger with this thinking that comes so naturally to us is the amount of happy hormones wishful thinking releases, making us not want to get out of that happy world. The moment we begin to count chickens, however, we tend stop working toward the goal we projected so beautifully. (To be clear, this is different for those of you who work with a dream in hand. Who work toward something you desire and overcome the odds to achieve the utopia in your head.) It does take intense effort on my part to stay focussed on being as useful as possible in the present.
Well, just an update on the floating leaf: more to come :)
