The Quiet War Between Now and Not-Yet
Living in the present is exceptionally hard. It is fraught with uncertainty and difficulty. It’s a nail biter of a game with no idea whether your team is going to be able to pull it out or not.
My natural preference is to live in the future. Even though it’s unknowable, there is clarity in planning for the future. I can envision different paths and contemplate what may be required to go down them.
Maybe your preference is to live in the past - bathing in the afterglow of fond memories. Or worse, beating yourself up over regrets.
Whatever your preference, I am willing to bet that your mind will naturally default to anything but the present.
Why we do this is a different matter - we are junkies for stories.
Our brains are narrative making machines. They take an overwhelming deluge of data from our senses and work to develop a story about what is going on in the world around us. The brain then makes predictions about what will happen next. This happens all day, every day. We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the input our brain receives. This is the “micro-story” of our lives.
But more than the micro story, there is also macro story of our lives. Our macro story is our attempt to make sense of all of our life’s experiences to date. We want to be able to understand why things have happened to us. But more than that, we want to understand where things are going. While our brains may predict at ‘micro-level’ what they think is going to happen in the near future, they also make bigger predictions about the longer-term story.
We call these longer-term predictions by many names - they may be dreams, ambitions, or worries. These predictions about the future reconcile our interpretation of our past and use our imagination to resolve the problems of the past in a way we deem satisfactory.
We use this predictive story as a way to feel like we have a degree of control over our futures, whether that is actually true or not.
But here’s the thing, that’s not how stories work (not good ones at least).
Author Brendan Sanderson talks a lot about what makes stories great. Something has to happen to a character, there has to be a problem, progress, and an ultimate payoff for a story to be compelling to read. There has to be change.
And yet, in our own stories, we either don’t want change at all (if the status quo is good) or we want to move from problem to payoff and skip the middle.
A story taking an unexpected twist or not resolving in ways we desired, can be massively disorienting - causing heartache, pain and suffering.
The “progress” part of your story is very hard to understand in the moment. So often it doesn't even feel like progress.
I have found the pursuit of excellence to be helpful in living in the “progress.” When we narrow our focus on craft, on the steady pursuit of improvement each day, we remove the tyranny of the past or speculation about the future.
Craft is a narrowing of focus to the present. It is about the next thing, not the final one.
It’s not to say the ultimate outcome is unimportant, just that it is unknowable. We’ll consider the long-term and how we should think about it in greater detail soon.