A few weeks ago, I was excited to run across the new book by Oliver Burkman, Meditations for Mortals. I also wrote about Burkman when I read his last book, Four Thousand Weeks. For the two books of his that I’ve read, instead of being overwhelmed by everything you could do, he focuses on embracing the limited time we do have to live, which apparently averages out to four thousand weeks.
Last time, I wrote about his idea that there’s likely too many good ideas, or big rocks, to reasonably accommodate them all.
Meditations expands on a lot of the same ideas like acknowledging that you have a finite time to live and that it’s possible you may never get a full handle on all of the work you have to do.
But something that really stuck out to me this time was making sure I was actually taking full advantage of the moment at hand.
So we spend our lives leaning into the future unconsciously deeming whatever’s happening now to be fundamentally flawed, because it’s marred by too many problems.
An issue I have is that I tend to defer my focus, my hope, and my happiness to the future. Like Berkman says, and apparently I’m far from alone, our tendency is to always assume that since the present requires fixing, the present moment isn’t really suitable to enjoy.
Maybe you think that you’ll be able to finally relax and be truly happy whenever you reach some certain goal. With money, it’d be easy to assume that you could actually enjoy yourself once you reach your financial goals. The debt’s been paid off, the emergency fund is in place, and your budget runs predictably month after month with no surprises. Maybe for exhausted parents, it’s the dream that your children will one day not be so exhausting and your efforts to stay caught up don’t feel quite so futile.
But the truth seems to be, and this is Burkman’s point, we never actually reach these points.
There’s always more work to be done. One goal reached may likely mean that a new goal gets set that will be the one to really make us happy this time.
One strange line of thinking I found myself fixated on happened when we had just gotten married. Out on our own for the first time, I was diving hard into personal finance. But all the talk about our money and our future created this view where my whole life was a means of serving my retirement. The money moves we made would set us up to be loaded, and then life would really be sweet.
I was skipping ahead of my whole life, in my mind, for retirement as a 25 year old.
The point is to enjoy your life now, although you still have goals you’re striving for, although you don’t have things fully wrapped up and tied with a bow, and although it’s likely some things still feel like a huge mess.
Work to enjoy the things that are in your life now.
I was struck by how thankful I am for where we are when our family went to the movies over the Thanksgiving break. We haven’t gone to the movies much with our young family mostly due to wiggly kids that can’t make it for the entire movie. But as our older kids have reached that age where they can make it through the movie and enjoy it, we’ve been going more.
But our three year old spent most of the time up and down, in and out of seats and laps. We’re juggling popcorn, my 32 ounce drink gets knocked to the floor(thankfully the lid held), and trying to somehow enjoy the movie.
The snobby part of me had a lot of opinions about the movie, which we didn’t think was that good. The whole situation was ripe for that sort of low discontentment that robs you of enjoying the moment.
But the truth is, I loved getting to go with my family. We were making memories with our kids.
There will come a day when our three year old sits still for a movie, and not every movie will be a home run, but I realized how thankful I was for the moment. We were making memories, and that made it perfect the way it was.
So work to make things better, to hit your goals, to put yourself in a better position for how you want to live. But don’t allow your discontentment for the moment to steal your enjoyment of your life now. Don’t wait for a moment when things are perfect, because it won’t ever come.
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