To Live in the Moment?

Will Browning, Year 11

There’s no time like the present. Live in the moment! Que sera, sera. Focus on the now and #love every moment! I’m sure you’ve all heard this kind of language, whether it be on your Facebook, browsing the internet, or in a library’s self-help section, next to the books about the ‘importance’ of star signs, or why we should all subscribe to a Neolithic-caveman inspired six-grain diet. It’s the latest millennial mindset: to live in the now, be present in the moment, and do away with overly-stressful planning and prior preparation. And while it’s a sure-fire way to absolve yourself of all your stress and forget about your troubles, I would argue that this increasingly-popular mindset actually ends up contributing to problems it’s supposed to solve.

You see, the key to leading a successful and fulfilling life is organisation. And the key to organisation…is you guessed it…taking a ‘big picture’ mindset and planning for the future. Because our lives aren’t well lived if we come to school for six lessons a day, go home and sleep. The way to have a truly fulfilling time at Trinity, and indeed the world, is to do other activities. Sport. Music. Public speaking. Anything that pushes you outside your comfort zone and fills up your calendar. And it’s simply impossible to lead this kind of life if you just stick your head in the sand, refuse to plan anything, take everything as it happens to come along, and claim it’s all under the banner of some magical life innovation of ‘living in the moment’. Because propagating this kind of mindset is synonymous with absolving an individual of any need to plan, to think for themselves, to actually have some kind of structure in their lives. It simply encourages people to become mindless, hedonistic pleasure-seekers who are hooked on instant gratification. Rather, I would argue that the achievement of meaningful goals is what brings true pleasure. I want you to reflect on these three questions: How do you want to look back upon today? How do you want to look back upon this year? How do you want to look back upon your life? The answers to these questions, no, how you want to be able to answer these questions, is the best way to inform your decisions in the ‘now’. Not just some superficial, impulsefollowing whim. We need to focus on the long-term, meaningful direction in which we want to steer our lives. And that requires forward vision. Which is not located just in the here and now.

But it’s not just forward vision that living in the moment obstructs. It’s backwards vision. Living entirely in the present hamstrings our ability to inspect the past. In the words of Spanish/American philosopher George Santayana: ‘Those who forget past mistakes are doomed to repeat them.’ Or, perhaps more relevantly, in the words of aspiring young Australian philosopher Will Browning: ‘Those who refuse to accept the existence of past failures because they can’t cope with the vast expanse of their own inadequacy, and who instead choose to follow a path of blissful hedonistic ignorance……are also doomed to endlessly repeat their mistakes because of a chronic inability to learn from them!’ Improving on past performance by learning from your mistakes is an integral part of becoming a better person. So, it’s very confusing, and slightly concerning if I’m being honest, that so many people seem content so simply block out their mistakes under the false guise of ‘being present in the moment’. Now let’s be clear here – it’s absolutely fine to make mistakes; in fact, I believe that doing so is actively healthy, because mistakes give us a great opportunity to improve ourselves. But I also believe that refusing to acknowledge failures and pretending like they don’t exist, is not only grossly hubristic and unbearably conceited, but literally slows the development of humankind as a species. It is a dangerous place to be where we are applauding those who do not strive to improve themselves and those around them. By living in the present, we effectively shut down our ability to appreciate or learn from the past.

I’d like to leave you tonight with a metaphor. Life, ladies and gentlemen, is like a pen on a page, endlessly flowing from one place to another. And while you can’t change what you’ve already written, you have total control over where to move the pen next. If you limit yourself to living entirely in the present, you will only ever be a simple dot on a page, totally unplanned for, totally meaningless, and forgotten as soon as the pen moves onwards. But, but, if you expand your mind to contemplate where you’ve been, and the words you’ve already written, you can comprehend exactly the story you want to write from here on in. So, stop – take a look up the page at your life story. Think about what you want to look back upon today, this year, and your life. And go and write it.