Monday
Letters to Children
Living in the Present II
Now, I need to mention that you will, in a way, be forced to leave the Holy Present occasionally when you are forced to make plans for your future. This, of course, is common sense.
But this common sense observation has many pits and traps. I believe “planning for the future” is the wickedest mental plague that inflicts efforts to live in the Holy Present. You must plan for the future or else you are irresponsible. You must make plans to attend college or graduate school. You must prepare resumes in search of a job. You must save money for the future (though, if you have no dependents, you may want to spend your money or give it away as it comes; it can give rise to a splendid life–reference the life of Bernard Iddings Bell, discussed on pages 168-172 of Russell Kirk's The Sword of Imagination).
But being responsible and planning prudently for the future has a nasty tendency to metastasize into worry, obsession, daydreams, and other things that poison the Holy Present. We have very little control over our future, but what little control we have tends to lure us from prudent planning to worrying or extravagant daydreaming (usually both; I find that pleasant daydreams of the future often, through a process I've never been able to discern, give rise to worries about the future).
In order to avoid this, it's helpful to have a standard with which we can try to discern whether we're prudently planning in the present or foolishly falling into the future. I like the standard Kallistos Ware laid down in this great book, The Orthodox Way: “While we are indeed required responsibly to plan for the future . . . we are to think about the future only so far as it depends upon the present moment. Anxiety over remote possibilities which lie altogether beyond our immediate control is sheer waste of our spiritual energies.” Similarly, George MacDonald said that “those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today.”
A standard, of course, is not a rule, and you should never confuse the two. From a standard, you derive rules. I can give you standards, but you'll have to work out many of the resulting rules for yourselves.
Nevertheless, I can give you a few rules here. First, avoid thinking about the far away future. Now, you're going to have goals in your life. If you're a sophomore in college, for instance, you may be thinking about becoming a lawyer like I was at that age. That's fine, but you shouldn't let thoughts of becoming a lawyer dominate your day-to-day affairs. You need to look at the long-range plan and break it down into the immediate concerns–and then keep yourself there. If you want to be a lawyer, you'll need to get into law school, so you'll need to have decent grades as an undergraduate, and in order to get decent grades, you'll need to study, and in order to study, you'll need to concentrate on the book or lecturer in front of you at the moment. At this point, you never need to think about becoming a lawyer–or what law school you'll attend, or your grade point average, or your grade in a particular class. You can just concentrate on, enjoy, the topic in front of you.
Resist the impulse to think about the things in the future because, by attending to the task at hand and having already taken some broad steps already (e.g., going to college in the first place and signing up for classes), you've done everything you need to do in order to plan prudently for the future. To allow thoughts of the future interrupt your moment-to-moment living leads to worry, anxiety, and other things that are poison to a joyful life.
You should also avoid daydreaming. Daydreaming is an enjoyable affair, but it's kind of like drinking alcohol: for every level of joyful inebriation you hit, there's usually additional down time. For every minute of daydreaming, I think you'll find you suffer from at least two minutes of worry and anxiety. That, anyway, has been my experience, though it took me until age thirty to discern it.
As I mentioned above, I can't see exactly how daydreaming gives way to anxiety in my soul, but it makes sense that such a thing would happen. You are meant to live in the present. If you leave the present in order to “live” in the future by daydreaming, you're leaving yourself open for the unpleasant aspects of living the future. If you go to a foreign country to sight-see, you're also opening yourself to things that might not be so pleasant–their roads, their food, even their police.
