1: Author Oliver Burkeman was anxious.
He was waiting for the subway at the Union Street station in Brooklyn “fretting in my customary manner, this time about the logistics of a forthcoming move between apartments, although it could have been anything,” he writes in his terrific book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
What was he worried about? He was waiting to learn if he’d be able to move in on the date he wanted. However, that was contingent upon when the departing tenant finalized her plans. Which wouldn’t happen for several more days.
“Suddenly, all this mental fidgeting struck me as absurd, and in a profound way,” he notes, “It wasn’t merely that I didn’t know the answer yet; it was that no answer would even exist until a point in the near future.”
2: This week, I’m switching the order of things. I’ve been writing about Oliver’s book Meditations for Mortals on Friday or over the weekend. Due to the 4th of July holiday, I’ve adjusted the order so we will explore the powerful lessons in Oliver’s book today, as I’ll be writing about the Declaration of Independence for the rest of the week.
As human beings, we are stuck in the present.
We are “unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there,” Oliver writes. “This is deeply disturbing, because it means that we suffer from what the psychologist Robert Saltzman calls ‘total vulnerability to events.'”
The truth is that anything can happen at any moment. “Or at least anything consistent with the laws of physics,” he adds.
In the very next second, “a beloved friend or companion could be lost forever in an instant,” Robert observes.
Is it likely that “a sinkhole will yawn open and swallow me on my next trip to purchase groceries?” Oliver writes. No. But “the unavoidable truth is that I can never rule it out.”
How do we cope with this frightening nature of reality? Well… By worrying.
Oliver asks: “What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in the future, then trying to figure out how to cross it?
“The compulsive and repetitious character of worry arises from the fact that for finite humans, this goal is doubly impossible,” he notes. “Firstly, we can’t possibly think of every challenge we might end up facing. Secondly, even if we could, the solace we crave could only come from knowing we’d made it safely over the bridges in question—which we can’t ever know until we’ve actually crossed them.”
Which often means, as Hannah Arendt writes: “Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.”
Ouch.
“There’s a tendency,” Oliver explains, “in self-help circles, to portray worry as an act of irrational foolishness; but in the prehistoric environment in which humans evolved, it made perfect sense. Things happened fast there. If we heard a rustling in the bushes, it was vital to fixate on wondering what might be causing it, a reaction that was accompanied by a spike of anxiety: that response would have kept us alert until a few seconds later, when we could confirm it was only a harmless bird.
“The trouble is that today,” he observes, “we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not.
“If our worry concerns something less immediate than a rustling in the bushes—if it’s about, say, whether our application for funding will be approved when the grants committee meets the month after next—then there’s no useful behavior for our anxiety to motivate, and nowhere for it to go. So it lingers and loops, distracting us from the tasks that might actually have helped us construct a more secure future.”
The Jedi mind trick is to remain confident in our abilities to handle what the future presents when it eventually arrives.
As the noted Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius once wrote: “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Also, note Marcus’s phrase “if you have to.” Because much of what we worry about never actually happens.
The better approach “is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best we can,” Oliver writes.
Sometimes, doing so involves a bit of common sense planning for the future.
“But we can do that, then let go of it, and move on; we needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of ourselves, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later. We get to stop fretting about literally everything other than how to spend the next instant in a wise, enjoyable or otherwise meaningful fashion. Finite human beings need never worry about anything else.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How much of my energy am I spending trying to solve problems that don’t even exist yet, instead of focusing on what I can do right now?
Action: Practice letting go of worries about the future by doing the next most necessary thing today, trusting I’ll handle future challenges when—and if—they arrive.
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