Living in the Present

I’m a planner, a fixer and a driver. I like to see results. I’m always stretching to get my arms around the endgame. So there’s a piece of me that always has a foot in the future. Part of it is probably genetic. In general, males are hardwired that way. We fix things, we build things, we fight wars. Sometimes that works to our advantage. But sometimes it doesn’t. That kind of “drive” can make it difficult to live in the present.

I struggle every year at this time. The back-to-school transition marks the official end of summer for me. It’s the time of year in our part of the country where the nights begin to cool down, the days become less warm, it gets darker earlier and light later and we begin to see more rain. Yesterday, for example, we had blue skies and 80+ degree weather. Today it’s raining and the temperature is hovering around 55.

I can deal with that. It’s what follows that bangs on my emotional armor. Winter in our area is brutal ... and when back-to-school time hits, I begin anticipating it with dread. It can be overcast for weeks at a time. Temperatures are wicked cold and the snow never seems to stop falling. Because of the almost constant cloud cover, I keep a “happy light” on my office desk and turn it on for 30 minutes every day so my pineal gland gets enough light to keep a modicum of “happy” hormones flowing in my body. There’s a joke in our area that they put Prozac in the water supply starting in October to keep people from jumping off tall buildings.

When I was younger all that crummy weather didn’t seem to bother me. I hunted more, I snowmobiled and I skied. But those days are past. My responsibilities have made those activities less available to me. So, winter is fairly restricted to hunkering down in survival mode until Spring arrives. For all these reasons, I have to fight melancholy in the first weeks of September.

But it occurred to me the other day that I could limit that struggle somewhat by not projecting so much what’s going to happen this winter and focusing on what we have left of summer and the early days of fall. September through mid-October in our area can be beautiful. White frost on the lawns and fields melts gently under gradually warming, blue skies during the mid-morning. Changing leaves paint reds, yellows and oranges across the countryside. Geese fly in V’s overhead and mums are in bright bloom. You can occasionally catch a whiff of what is to me, one of the most wonderful of scents … the bittersweet odor of a wood fire wafting out of someone’s chimney.

So it dawned on me that I’m actually living more of winter than I have to by thinking about it before it actually arrives. It reminded me of Christ’s counsel, “Take no thought of tomorrow. For tomorrow will take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” In other words, take it a day at a time.

That’s a challenge whether you’re staring down the barrel of a long, dark winter, wondering about the security of your job, dealing with a difficult illness, wrestling with family problems or struggling with any of the other seemingly numberless dilemmas that seem endemic to mankind. But it makes good sense.

By living in the future you rob yourself of today. By anticipating what it’s going to be like in a week or a month or a year, you divert your attention from simply living. So try to take things a day at a time.