Now

When I was a kid, I always had a problem taking naps or going to sleep. I remember distinctly being struck by the injustice of being sent to bed, while the rest of the world continued living without me. It seemed grossly unfair that everybody else on the planet was up doing cool stuff and having fun while I slept. Even though most of the world's activities were continuing regards of whether or not I was awake, or even aware of what was going on. I couldn't help but feel that I was missing out on life for every minute that I spent in bed. Clearly, the only logical and just solution was for the world to be paused until I awoke again. 

My perspective on sleep has sadly changed, as I have become shamefully less upset at not being included in this whole thing. Thinking about it now, it seems totally wasteful that I would generally prefer a half an hour's unconsciousness to the glories and treasures of waking life. But I have to confess that I'm now an old man in that way. 

There was something that little kid Greg knew that present tense Greg forgot. After I had gotten a little older, I began to look forward to birthdays as benchmarks on my way to real life as a big kid. When I became a junior higher, I eagerly awaited high school in hopes that my awkward and laughable circumstances would change. In high school, I wanted to be in college and start doing things that I "really" wanted to do. For most of college, I was desperate to graduate and start my "real" life. As I started creeping up on graduation, I began to realize how sweet I had it. But I could have just as easily continued the trend and entered grad school, eager to graduate so I could start a career of being eager for retirement. Only to retire and figure out some life lesson or another that some old people seem to know. 

To make a long story short, I wasted a lot of time wanting the future before I realized that I was buying a lie. A lie that has been hard to unlearn. For the longest time I believed that the present moment would prove to be less important or less enjoyable than some future moment. Terms like "the real world" and "when I start my life" made me a slave to a future I really had no stake in. Focusing my energies and attentions on the belief that the future will be better than the present resulted in not a few bad habits:

1. First, by focusing on how the future would be better, or more meaningful, or more "real" (whatever that means) I was implicitly acknowledging that I was unhappy with my current circumstances. Living in the future made me incapable of appreciating what I actually had in the present. If I had been able to pull my head out of the sand and realize how good my actual day to day life was, if I was able to practice real gratitude, I wouldn't have needed to spend so much time trying to live in the future. Instead, my ingratitude kept me chained to some fantasy world that was never more real than the present moment I was avoiding. 

2. Instead of looking my circumstances in the eye, recognizing my ingratitude, my problems, and my opportunities like a man, I set my eyes on some shadowy distant idealized future in which everything would be better for some reason (Although I must confess, I am still subject to this temptation - frequently). The problem was that this view prevented me from changing the things about my life that I didn't like. If I had faced my problems instead of imagining a future without them, not only would I have been happier in the present, I also would have had a better shot at building the future that I wanted for myself. I didn't like my high school experience, (Even though I had great friends, a great family, and a whole host of other reasons to be happy) but instead of changing the things I didn't like and had control over (there were many) I choose to sulk and daydream about going to x prestigious college in y pretentious city and studying z pretentious major where I could become a pretentious leader in my pretentious field - despite the fact that I spent  zero time developing the drive, skills, and intelligence necessary to bring about that ridiculous future that seemed so certain to me in my day dreams. 

3. The lie made me unhappy. Like rubbing salt in a wound, my certain belief that the future would be better than the present only highlighted and inflamed the frustrating parts of my actual life. Like so many grievances, if I had only diverted my attention from them, they would have gone away. I was picking at a cut and only making it worse. I was licking chapped lips. Wallowing in my fantasy future gave me temporary comfort from my problems, but only made them worse in the long run by failing to face them or let them go. 

In his book, "Stumbling on Happiness" psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes about how terribly poor humans are at predicting what will make them happy latter on in life. "Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? ... when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward." I find myself so often at the end of an endeavor, or goal, or project, and look back to find that I feel completely different about it than what I had predicted at the beginning. And yet I spend so much time living inside an unreasonable future.

It's so easy to get stuck in our heads with a whole pile of silly plans. We think, "How will I be happy? Well, I'll go to this school and get this degree, and then that will let me get this masters degree, which will let me enter this profession, which will let me get this pension, oh and along the way I'll get a wife, so I can have some kids to support me when I'm old, and I'll work till I'm sixty five. And then I'll cash my pension and retire to Florida, and buy a boat and wear a hat that says "#1 Grandpa" and THEN, I'll be happy." But if we live a life that only yields happiness at the end, what the hell were we doing the rest of the time? 

Happiness isn't about proper planning; it's about gratitude, which happens in the present.

As I write this I realize how much I still need to learn this lesson. I've got a long way to go. In general, I consider myself a man of half baked plans, and I have a hard time keeping my head out of the clouds. But in the end, I have no interest in leading a "carrot on a string" life.  I have no interest in chasing after some future dream that will supposedly yield a humble, wise, happy man - despite the fact that I put no effort into developing the character I wanted when I had the chance. I am interested in making decisions about my life. Here, now, on the ground. 

Gratitude means recognizing that each moment is as significant as the one preceding it, and the one following it. When you wake up, while you bathe, while you eat, while you sleep, while you do paperwork, when you're with your loved ones, when you are with people you dislike, when you're traveling, when you're on the train, when you're working, when you're playing, when you're arguing, flirting, joking, reading, crying, fighting, being bitter, being happy, being bored, being old, being young, Being, your life is happening. Seamlessly, inexorably, breath after breath. Gratitude means taking each moment, no matter how mundane, and arresting it, recognizing it, seeing it for the gift it is, and submitting to being in it. As it happens. One by one. 

Time

It is very difficult for me to sit and look at the times and circumstances in which I find myself and those around me, and not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of opportunity and challenge that we alone as a generation are privileged to face. This was in large part the topic of my previous post. Our time is a unique, chaotic, and beautiful one - if not brutal. In some sense, we are truly a lucky generation, and we need to recognize that fact.

However, there is another aspect of our times for which, I think, we are to be the most pitied. Even while we have access to tools and technologies unheard of by any age before us, we are also cursed with the terrible and seductive powers of abundant, meaningless, and fruitless pleasure. Never before has mankind been so able to distract himself. Never before have we had access to such myriad and varied ways of piddling a life away. Never before has man been so good at wasting time. 

Consider how you or I might choose to fill a small block of free time in the year 2012. Let's say, ten minutes. I think it would be fair to say that most of us would have the impulse during this small break to check the internet. For me, when it is available, this is my strongest temptation. Facebook. Twitter. Reddit. IMDB. Wikipedia. Your particular farmville clone. Snopes. XKCD. Yahoo. Etc. Etc. Or let's say your have a bigger span, maybe an hour or two. Why not watch a movie? Play some call of duty. Watch some Lost, or Bones, or 24, or whatever new pop sitcom or action serial is popular. Get back to farmville (Seriously, for pete's sake what is the appeal of this game?!) World of Warcraft. Whatever your particular vice (Recently mine has been watching the X-Files.)

Look. I'll let you decide what you consider to be a waste of time or not. It's your life and I don't care to defend or attack pedantic arguments about why such and such stupid waste of time is or isn't a stupid waste of time. I just think that at the end of the day, there will be a shamefully large amount of people who will be lying on their deathbed and feel embarrassed by how much time they spent playing "Angry Birds". 

Don't get me wrong, I am in the same thumb twiddling boat as everybody else. I recognize the herculean effort it takes to resist the simple endorphin releasing pleasures of youtube. It's hard to walk forward on the path that's adorned with so many neon signs. Especially when so many of us have nothing to walk toward. I think there are a couple big reasons why permanent distraction has become such a serious pitfall for our busy world.

Aside from the technological advances that have made such fantastic and addictive pleasures so abundant, which I think are more or less apparent, there is a huge ideological problem that's been forty or fifty years in the making (In America at least). It's an old and popular idea, but it's never been a good one for building and maintaining societies. In essence, it's the belief that pursuing personal gratification is an acceptable goal for a human life. In other words, "If it makes you happy, do it." In a sense, we all act in our own self interests at all times. However, by setting up personal, individual happiness as the most important goal of our lives, we've lost a lot of our ability to sacrifice immediate pleasures for more meaningful and lasting accomplishments. 

This particular form of hedonism (which is really as old as people are) has seriously eroded our ability to serve a cause greater than ourselves. Ideas like duty, commitment, loyalty, discipline, and service are not conductive to such a worldview, and are the first things to go when our lives don't seem to be serving our greatest personal interest. Especially in the absence of causes greater than ourselves to dedicate our short lives to. These sort of greater works that our grandfathers had unfortunately are seemingly unable to satisfy in the same way as they did before. We can serve a nation that commits actions we can't condone. We can give our lives in service to a religion that we don't believe in or doesn't work. We can dedicate our lives to a company that will gamble away our pensions. We can lay down our lives for a marriage that statistically is bound to fail, and where such a failure is socially acceptable. Long story short, the growing distrust of our oldest institutions, institutions that at one time gave our lives meaning, now leave us in a world without a compass bigger or truer than our own desires. 

But I think there is another big reason why we have become so excellent at wasting time. Advances in medicine have changed the way we look at death, and therefore, how we look at time. Our ancestors we're considered lucky if they could scrape out a meager 40 or 50 years of hard labour, the lion's share of which was pure toil - survival itself was a major chore. Today, most of us expect at best, and at worst feel entitled to, a long life of 70 or 80 years of relative ease. A family and a house. A steady job. Certainly no want for food. And anyone who doesn't achieve these milestones is considered a sad and unlucky case, however exceptional nonetheless. Only a hundred years ago, millions of young men and women were cut down at 19 and 20 to war and disease. An entire generation, lost. Today, a man who dies at fifty is claimed - with perhaps some legitimacy - to have been unfairly taken at such a young and blossoming age. 

In brief, because our highest commitment is to our own pleasure, due to the crumbling or absence of higher causes, and the seemingly distant day of our deaths are some big reasons why we can spend two hours in a day playing words with friends. 

But the truth is, we have no guarantee of that time. I'll probably be dead a hundred years from now. But there's a chance that I could die later today. The real truth is old and tired, but true: we can't add an hour to our lives. Our time is not our own, and what we are given, however brief, is a gift. 

Recently I've become obsessed with the following question. It's become the first thought I have when I wake up, and the last thought I have before I fall asleep. It's a frightening idea, and perhaps morbid, but a sobering one. The question I find myself asking most often these days is this: if you die today, what will you have to show for it?

I've had an excellent and healthy 21 years, and God willing I'll have another 20 more. But there is simply no guarantee that we will wake up tomorrow. It takes incredible willpower to keep this truth in mind everyday, especially when so much of that time is spent in monotony and tedium. What man truly understands that he is dying daily? But remember, gratitude is all about having the proper perspective, and the honest truth is that these twenty one years I have enjoyed; I did nothing to earn them. And any time beyond that is not entitled to me, but simply a gift over which I have no control. 

I say this not to be morbid or depressing. I do say this to scare you, because we should be afraid of wasting a life that is not ours to waste. 

Gratitude can be a motivating force. We often think of gratitude as a reflective, passive attitude. We look back at the things we've been given, and then feel grateful. However, real gratitude is about recognizing our gifts and responding appropriately. I don't know what the appropriate response is to the fact that our days are numbered, however I bet that it doesn't involve a facebook app. 

Imagine a man who was given twenty thousand dollars. His benefactor declares that the money is his to do whatever he wants with, just as long as he stayed reasonably in touch. Many years later the benefactor and the man run into each other, and the rich man asks how the young man spent the money he had given him. He looks down at his shoes, shrugs, and with a whimper he explains: "Well, I spent a couple hundred on an xbox, that was probably the first thing. Then I bought a car, but I crashed it. Ahhh. I went to this fancy restaurant I like a lot. I gave some to my buddy Ron because we wanted to buy a boat. I lost a bunch in this pyramid scheme. Oh I gave some to charity! But that was pretty much just what I had left over after the trip to Hawaii...So um. Yeah that's about it. Thanks a lot by the way. I really appreciated it." 

That's not what gratitude looks like. Gratitude takes a gift and puts it forward. Gratitude takes time and spends it on others. 

A day is going to come when you will be called to account for every hour you had and spent. Either by God or by your own conscience, you're going to ask yourself, "What have I to show for my life? What did I do with my youth when I had it? What I do with my older years, that so many are denied? Did I do everything I possibly could have to use it well?" We're human, we all have regrets, we all waste time. But a deep, abiding gratitude for our lives and for the time that has been given to us will produce an appropriate response. The grateful do not squander their gifts, and hopefully true gratitude can help us from squandering our very lives.