500 Words a Week - What if we never figure it out?
“It turns out my really big problem was thinking I might one day get rid of all my problems, when the truth is that there's no escaping the mucky, malodorous compost-heap of this reality.”
The above quote was from a post from Oliver Burkeman, he wrote one of my favourite books, Four Thousand Weeks, which I strongly recommend. In the post titled “What if you never sort your life out”, Oliver talks about how many of us go through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing yet. Soon, we will have everything in working order, we will get organised, when we figure things out and get our personal issues resolved. Unwittingly what we are doing, is living what psychologists call living the “provisional life”. A strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, we may be doing this or that but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about or start.
Oliver discuss’ how our many pursuits to become better people, fitter and healthier, more productive or organised have actually made this problem worse. As it’s impossible to pursue any element of personal change without the thought that upon completing the change you will transform yourself into the person you want to be.
However, the problem with the above, is that it detracts from the quality of life we are experiencing now. When we are constantly envisioning the future, we forget what’s in front of us. We believe that in this hypothetical future, all our problems will be solved, we believe we will have all the answers to the questions that plague us. Yet, we forget that in some form or another we will always have problems, we will always have questions.
The reason why I think this is relevant is because we all have that little voice in our head saying “You’ll be happy when…”, giving a whole host of reasons to why you can’t be happy now. When you look back on the past, you have already achieved things that you once said to yourself would make you happy, and did they do this? Maybe for a day, or a week, or a month but sooner or later that voice crept back up discussing the next thing you think you need to do to be happy. It’s a trap, one that if we aren’t conscious of it can change our outlook on what’s happening around us now. If we can catch ourselves when we begin fantasizing about how much better the future will be and realise in some form or another we will always be feeling or thinking about the next thing. We will always have some form of problems. We can’t let this rid us of our ability to enjoy where we are now.
