The Surrender Project: Day 22: Yet Another Lesson on Presence
It is a beautiful thing to witness certain things fall into place in the right timing. Almost where it seems too good to be true and definitely makes me doubt the validity of coincidences. In this case I am talking about two things, one that I cannot quite discuss on the blog purely because it will be a better story in a few days. The one I can discuss isn’t some wild event or meeting some person on the streets in a random city in India but rather a book that came across my path that seems to carry the perfect message for my life right now. Actually, I would argue the perfect message for just about anybody, especially those in a position of seeking what is next in life. Day 22 was a day full of reading, a day which I very much so enjoyed.
I realized that over the recent days some of my writings have taken on a theme of looking to the future. I have talked about home, about what to do next, about having some feelings around this chapter of my life in general, and overall I think getting a little bit ahead of myself. Especially when we go back to the day of me talking about feeling that overwhelming dreamer energy, of wanting to do crazy things with this life and maximize on the opportunity of life that we have. Right when I am in a midst of thinking about all the bucket list items I want to accomplish and how I am going to be able to live so fully a book sticks out to me. As I have previously mentioned I have a note in the notes app on my phone that is titled, “Reading List” with an ever increasing list of books that I want to read. Some of them I know nothing more than the title of the book, maybe one I saw in a bookstore or heard a recommendation for at some point. So, after I finished Man’s Search For Meaning I was ready for the next read. This is no easy task, choosing which book to dive into, as my list has about fifty or so books on it and most of them I really have no idea what they are about. The title Four Thousand Weeks catches my attention so without thinking further I google a pdf version and download it into my kindle app. Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting that I do not typically pay for books, but find a pdf version online for free, but here we are. I downloaded it without looking into what it was going to be about and just started reading this morning pretty quickly after I woke up. Within a minute I realized I had chosen to read a book about time management (which is also in the full title), not exactly the compelling story I was hoping for as I backpack through India but the first few pages caught my attention. I typically rather enjoy non-fiction books about learning certain things to make our lives “better” even though most of the time I think they just provide a new angle to view something, not a way to live a “better” life. This book by Oliver Burkeman doesn’t claim to lead to a better life, in fact it isn’t a normal time management book full of hacks to free up time to do things you love, it is a challenge to realize that we never will have enough time and to just accept that fact. Of course there is a lot more to it and it is infinitely more elegantly said than I seem to make it in that last sentence, I am just trying to say it isn’t a normal time management book. The writing style reminds me of Mark Manson’s famous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, that takes an approach of waking up to reality and to stop dreaming about impossible things. I am not going to summarize Four Thousand Weeks as I truly think it is a book each of us should read, but I am going to point out a few things that smacked me across the face and why it seems to have fallen into my lap at an opportune time. My notes app is already getting filled with quotes from it and my recent photos are about ten screenshots of pages with ideas that I thought were excellently articulated, and I am only halfway through.
A theme that has stuck out to me is Burkeman’s argument that we spend all of our time focused on where we are going that we never actually stay in the present. Even our leisure time is spent with a focus on pushing us somewhere in the future. We go to work everyday with the goal of exceeding to move on to the next level, to make more money, to be able to buy a bigger house, to keep going after the next thing so much so that we never actually enjoy it for what it is. He goes on to mention that even parent our children in a specific way so that we are setting them up for success, not taking into consideration the intrinsic value of enjoying them in the now. He talks about how they say it isn’t good to train your child to fall asleep on your chest because it teaches them some habit that might be worse off for them in the future. He argues that the feeling of your baby falling asleep on your chest also is out-of-this-world incredible, so why doesn’t that count for something as well? He quotes the well known Alan Watts, “Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade . . . In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world . . . People are like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here, They never get there. They are never alive.” Now, the ending is a bit intense but the message holds true, everything we do and focus on is with a future-chasing-mindset. We treat every moment of our life experience as only worthwhile in terms of bringing us closer to the next step we are chasing after. I am sure I am not doing as sound of a job as Burkeman does, but hopefully the point is coming across a bit. We simply do not exist in the present. He even talks about leisure time, how we seem to have to do things for our rest that are propelling us towards a better version of ourselves. I am SO guilty of this. Go back and read my previous blogs, I am talking about exploring and traveling and putting myself in challenging positions with the intention that I will learn and grow into a more rounded person who has experiences in uncomfortable situations and it will teach me new lessons in life. I find myself even getting a high from experiences I know will make good stories one day, such as in the middle of the wedding, thinking about telling this story to friends one day. We are so focused on what is next that we remove ourselves from the present. “Ohhh great, Henry is off his rocker writing about being present again.” Damn freaking right I am. Over and over I keep experiencing these lessons that force me back to being present, like a reminder from life that the whole fucking point of this project is to be present and not know what is going to happen. That life is going to be full of mundane things or situations where we are so focused on what it will provide us in the future. When in all reality, “you only ever get to feel certain about the future once its already turned into the past” that there is no such thing as certainty in anything we get to experience, no matter how much we plan for it. We straight up do not have control over where we go in life, and why would we even want that control at the end of the day? Think about where you are right now, how many life experiences you have, every little detail of your life that you value so much, all of that became what it was based on circumstances that you never had any control over or got to choose in the first place. Maybe you are 60 and sitting next to your spouse with a house of kids, the things you love most all fell into place from circumstances you had no control over. You had no control bumping into your partner 40 years ago at a bar, and because of that one weird encounter you now have kids and grandchildren who are more important than anything else will ever possibly be. It is not in our control, so a reminder to release to it and enjoy the moment you are in. And just to take it a step further, there is no certainty about the future. I think about my good friend, Charlie, who was stolen way too early from this life and what he would do to be able to miss a bus or read a book while listening to the honking on the streets of India. You may be thinking damn Henry, that got dark. But it is true, there is no certainty in what is next and there will be a last time for everything. A last time to hug your parents, a last time you sip a beer at a bowling alley with your friend, a last time you swim in the ocean. The list goes on and on. I guess this book just struck me so hard as a reminder that there will be a last time I get on the back of a strangers moped in India. A last time I have the ability or opportunity to feel homesick as I am by myself traveling the world. To actually enjoy the process of life, and to stop making everything we do so focused on what version of ourselves we will get to become in the future. Go on a run because you love the feeling of a runners high, not only because you have to run a marathon to check it off your experiences list or because if you lose ten pounds then you will be confident and happy. Yes, have goals and seek them out, but enjoy the process of getting there even more so than the final achievement.
This all also made me reflect on my own desires to max out this life. How I was worried the other day about thinking I am wasting my time by just sitting around my hostel and reading and writing all day and not going out and about to explore. It struck me that sitting in the sun and reading is exactly what I want to do sometimes, that even if it isn’t maxing out my time in India it is allowing me to just be me and exist in the way I want to in that moment. That we do not have to treat the present as merely a path to some superior future state. If we are always living for the future it will never come, because the future is still the future and we just keep chasing that carrot that’s dangling in front of our face. I write this as a reminder to myself to not chase after that successful future Henry who has worldly experiences and all the other bucket list items crossed off so much so that I lose focus that I am in my life living it right now. That today I get to have my own experiences that I will not be able to predict. Maybe they will be high, maybe they will be low, but they are still an unknown experience that I have the gift of being able to live. I wrote about this in my blog titled “Presence” a year and half ago when I talked about enjoying the drive to work. Whether or not you enjoy it is up to you, but you are going to have to drive to work anyway. Why be pissed off that you have to sit in your car for 15 minutes if you’re going to have to sit in your car either way. It is quite easy for me to get ahead of myself, dreaming about where I want to be and how I am going to get there. Yes, I still see the value in having goals that we want to reach for and achieve, but not to allow them to be the reason and sole focus of why we do the thing. Yes, I am excited to see who I become after travel and see these lessons I have learned come to light in a job or different environment, but I need to slow down and appreciate the actual experiences that are giving me those lessons in the first place. Overall, I am pretty present right now. I spend my days doing things I enjoy, I am not really planning too much for the next weeks or months of my life, and I try not to think too much about where I am going. But there are times such as some recent writings where I have found myself too deep in what is next, or what I am getting out of the situation. Let us take the situation from yesterday when I was feeling homesick and a little lonely. Even in the middle of feeling those emotions I was thinking to myself how to accurately portray this in writing, or what parts of this I wanted to remember when I wrote about it the next day. I was taking a present situation and trying to see how I could retract value out of it for a future me. Now, I would argue that this was a valuable thing to do in this situation, to learn and grow from the ability to feel. But the point still stands, how hard it is to actually stay present. And the truth is we are not going to be present for a lot of things and it is hardwired in our DNA to strive for things that help us grow and evolve to live longer. There is a quote from the book that might be my favorite and it goes, “living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.” There only is the now. It isn’t actually possible to live in the future or the past, even if we find ourselves thinking about them all the time. The only option is to be in the now, so might as well embrace that and come to terms with the fact that there isn’t any other way.
I know I have written about the idea of presence a lot. There seems to be a lot of truth in it and a reason that it is at the core of every single theory or book that I read. Every religion in some way preaches presence, and heck it is even one of three themes of my most recent tattoo, with the largest piece of it a representation of presence for me and to remember the power of it. No matter how much it continues to pop up there seems to be a never ending need for the reminder, as it isn’t as easy as a simple decision to live in the present for it to take effect. Even if the whole focus of this project and my intentions of the day to day are to be present, I find myself looking ahead or reflecting on the past a lot of the time. It is a muscle that needs to be exercised over and over, a muscle that I am quite certain is going to be one of the most important aspects for living a life that I want to (isn’t this ironic? Even now as I talk about being present I mention it in light of helping me in the future and how it will assist me in my overall life. It really is incredibly challenging to be allow things to just be what they are). Of being able to find peace in the day to day, of fully experiencing everything that I have the opportunity to in the first place, and having the perspective to see it for what it is in that moment. Those are the three themes I decided to implement into my tattoo on my left arm: peace, presence, and perspective. And three guiding principles for how I go about my day to day life.
Today turned out to be completely based on my reading from the day and not at all about the experiences of the day. Which, to be fair, mostly consisted of reading and writing, with a few breaks to get some food. Overall I found a lot of peace in the day and a reminder that I am still on vacation, that this is still a time that I can choose to take a break and do, frankly, whatever I want. I have the freedom to sit around and read all day if I want and what a gift that is. It is rare to have the freedom to do as we please every single day with no responsibilities (besides the writing that I chose myself) and I want to make sure that I continue to appreciate that there will not be many times in my life where I have such freedom. Whether it is because I have a partner, kids, a family, or whatever else that requires me to be more attuned to others. That the point of this project overall is to allow life to just flow through me, to do what is calling me in, even if it means doing nothing but laying around and reading books that excite me. I am serious about the book recommendations too. If I had to guess I will be continuing on this path of reading a lot in the coming weeks and months of solo travel, especially as I refrain from scrolling social media and try to be intentional with my time. As I am pretty sure Burkeman mentions as well in the book, that we spend our lives doing whatever we do in the present, so if you are 80 and reflecting on your life and you spent 3 hours a day scrolling Tik Tok, is that how you want to look back and realize you spent your time? Life is comically short, and I want to be intentional about how I spend the 4,000 weeks I might get. I think I will look back and be glad I spent 200 of them reading books, no matter if it was fantasy or non-fiction, but I am not sure I would be proud to know I spent 200 of them scrolling random videos on Instagram. How do you want to spend your life? I mean whatever you are actively doing right now is how you are spending it after all. So, maybe just check in with yourself and think about if you are doing it only as a means to an end that you may never reach, or if you are able to enjoy the process for what it is as well. I do not have the answers, I am right alongside you reflecting on these questions as well and where I stand with them today. I will close this out with a classic short story of a wealthy vacationing businessman who is talking with a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. The businessman offers a piece of advice; if the fisherman worked harder, he could invest the profits into a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to fish, and make millions, then retire early. The fisherman asks, “and what would I do then?” The businessman replies, “ah, well then, you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with friends.” (Four Thousands Weeks).
