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“When You Can’t Stop Looking Ahead, Look Backwards”

Monday, August 14, 2017 14:49

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“When You Can’t Stop Looking Ahead, Look Backwards”

by David Cain

“There’s a particular emotion we all know, but I don’t think it has a name. It’s the distinct, perplexing feeling of remembering the first hours after waking up, and finding it unbelievable that that happened today. It’s most obvious late in an eventful day, particularly if you woke up unusually early. Usually it’s a “big day” in some sense, with a lot at stake – an exam, a wedding, an early flight, a presentation.

You’ve probably felt it while traveling, especially on the first day of a trip, when you made an early departure, arrived in a new city by afternoon, and then started sightseeing before dinner. By bedtime, the memory of waking at dawn and loading the car, back in your own driveway, in your home city, seems so distant to the present moment that it couldn’t have been today.

I’m sure part of this feeling comes from the unusual length of those kinds of days. But I think a bigger part comes from how drastically our emotional state has changed since the day began. The feeling of scrambling against clocks to make everything work is starkly different from the feeling of relaxing into the first evening in a new and interesting place, having forgotten what time it is.

Whatever we name it, this perplexing emotion is a more than just an interesting experience. It reveals an oversight we are continually making about the nature of our worries. We all know what it’s like to remember how singularly worried we were last month about some upcoming, important event. Now that we’re beyond it, all the worrying we did seems unnecessary. We wish we could have told ourselves that all we had to do was attend to what we could and let things unfold. Trouble is magnified when we look forward in time

In one of his talks, Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein points out a human tendency we seldom recognize: we spend most of our lives anticipating the next significant experience to happen to us. The typical occupation of the human mind is to lean towards some seemingly important or pivotal experience that’s coming up today, or in the coming week or two.

Sometimes this upcoming thing is happening later in the day, such as a flight, or later this month, such as a presentation at work. It can even be something a few moments from now, such as when the microphone finally comes to you during one of those dreaded “Tell us something about yourself” circles at the beginning of a workshop.

Whatever the scale of it, there is almost always, at the fore of our minds, some primary, upcoming experience that it’s hard not to keep picturing, fearing, and rehearsing for. Whether this anticipated event is a speech, a date, an exam, or a conversation with your neighbor about their dog’s bathroom habits, the only worry we have is that it will result in some sort of pain, such as embarrassment, boredom, loss, physical unpleasantness, or even more uncertainty.

Because we’re so unwilling to experience pain, we obsess over this impending experience, trying to explore and rehearse its possibilities so that we can somehow remove the uncertainty from it, and at least know what we’re in for. This obsessing has a kind of magnifying effect on the event’s ultimate importance, however. When we’re preoccupied with the latest Primary Upcoming Experience, we tend to see it as much more concrete and pivotal to our lives than it will be once we’re able to look back on it.

Of course, we can’t look back on the current Primary Upcoming Experience, because it hasn’t happened yet (and may never happen). But we can look back on what was heavy in our minds in the past. When we think about what we were preoccupied with this time last year, or last week, or yesterday, we can get a sense of how drastically, and frequently, the feeling of what’s important right now changes. Then when you turn your gaze forward again, you can more easily understand that this newest seemingly-pivotal experience will unfold the same way all the others did:

•It will happen differently than how you pictured it, in significant ways.

•It may or may not be painful.

•The most painful parts will pass relatively quickly.

•You won’t know what it will mean for your life until a lot of time has passed.

•Lastly, your preoccupation will shift to a new “most important thing” after this one is resolved.

This is the ephemeral nature of human experience, and remembering the gist of it can really take the edge off our current worries. So when it seems like you can’t stop looking forward, look back. They all came and went, and few of them seem to justify the worry we suffered over them.

Because we overlook the ephemeral, passing quality of the events in our lives, we engage in this habit of obsessing over the latest uncertainty, stretching its potential pain into days or weeks of guaranteed pain, in the form of worry. By perpetually trying to guarantee for ourselves a painless future, we are perpetually creating a painful present.

Moving away from worry means giving up the idea of a painless future We’re very accustomed to worrying, and it’s such a conditioned pattern that there’s no slam-dunk antidote. The mind just jumps into scenarios and visions. To make things worse, our culture also does a great job of fueling and celebrating worry.

Over time, we can decondition our patterns of rumination, through self-reflection and meditation. But in the mean time, we can temper the heat of worry considerably whenever we remember the ephemeral, quickly-passing nature of our experience.

There really isn’t any way to look forward, in any reliable sense. It turns out we’re always in the position of entering a new and unpredictable experience, even on a presumably routine day, and we might feel safer if we acknowledged that. That way, we could count on self-reliance and resilience to get by, rather than clairvoyance, which we don’t have anyway.

There’s something exhilarating about really taking that on board. The future isn’t knowable enough to justify flow-charting our responses or rehearsing certain catastrophes. We have no idea what we’re walking into, and it’s obvious – when we look back at our decades of misplaced worries and unforeseen setbacks – that we never have.

Imagine the perspective you might gain if you were to write down on an index card, every Sunday evening, what upcoming thing you’re most concerned about right now – and what you believe will happen – then dump them out at the end of the year, and have a good laugh.”

- http://www.raptitude.com/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2017/08/when-you-cant-stop-looking-ahead-look.html

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