As long as I can remember, people have been teaching me to relax,
enjoy the moment, smell the roses and just take it easy—to live life
one day at a time. This wisdom is at the center of Alcoholic Anonymous’
prescription for living a sober and sane life. I wonder why it is so
difficult—even rare—to live in the moment and why I find it easier to
do so as I grow older?
I
suppose, when we are younger, we are more goal-oriented and don’t have
a lot of history under our belt. As we age, we realize we’re not going
to accomplish everything. So we become more selective about what we
want and appreciate it more when we get it. I think we also learn to
live without expectations, which also helps us to ‘be here now’. If we
are lucky, we get the opportunity to pass these maxims on to our
children and grandchildren.
Obviously, we can’t be present while we’re living in the future or
living in the past. Even as a matter of logic and common sense, the
present moment is all there is. Tomorrow isn’t here and yesterday has
disappeared. Today is all there is. So if we are really
aware and conscious of what is real and who we are, the only choice is
to live in the present—to surrender to the moment and just BE. Our only
alternative is to resist being present, which we do in a thousand
ways—from trying to control everyone and everything in sight to
suffering, struggling and falling into a labyrinth of moods and
internal conversations about everything.
In my experience, my ‘ego’ (or what I call my ‘internal
conversation’) is really a time machine whose primary job seems to be
to remember stuff (real or imagined) from my past and project it into
the future in the form of expectations and predictions. My mind’s idea
of the future, in turn, informs my thinking and decisions, which
results in my doing more variations of what I have already done. This,
in turn, produces the results I expected and, when my expectations go
unfulfilled, gives me the opportunity to make up reasonable
explanations for why things didn’t work out.
Most people ‘expect’ old age (which is relative to however old we
are at the moment) to be an undesirable state. We can hear a thousand
examples of people talking about “I don’t look forward to getting
older, but…” Since we will get old whether we want to or not,
the choice is between accepting and embracing that fact OR resisting
it, in one way or another, and living in the past or fearing the
future. If we are not living our life in the present, decline in old
age becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My career has been about coaching leaders to create the future, not
to simply cope with the circumstances they encounter. I suggest that
everyone has the capacity to create their own reality through
commitment and action consistent with a vision or possibility that is
larger than the predictable future (what I call the ‘circumstantial
drift’). There is no question that this capability is available to
everyone and we have all experienced breakthroughs and profoundly
creative moments in our lives.
Why not apply these experiences to our lives and our communities as
we get older? Why not be leaders after we retire, and create a future
that is as enlivening as any other time in our lives, perhaps even more
so? Why don’t we take on old age with enthusiasm and live it one day at
a time?
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a
purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of
nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and
grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making
you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole
community and as long as I can live it is my privilege to do for it
whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the
harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life
is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have
got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as
possible before handing it on to future generations.
—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
