Now and Then

   
If only I were younger, thinner, richer, more widely published, with somebody. If only I didn't have this physical pain. If only I were less impulsive, more matter-of-fact, more serene.  If only I had known then what I know now

But, of course, I have been younger, thinner, richer and completely without pain.  What about those days, what about then?  What were my "if only's" way back when?

What I desired then is not what I want now. Then, I wanted more patients, one more degree, way more excitement.  Now, I want a lot of what I do have....but I am still capable of nudging myself into what the Buddha would call a life of (relatively small) suffering by looking past my present to the uncharted future, to whatever is coming around the corner. Oh, then, then, then.

"Chronic anticipation", said aurhor Theodore Rubin, "is an attempt to control all of life's possible confrontations and makes it impossible to be peaceful or easygoing."  Well, I know that, and so do you. We all know that. But that doesn't keep us from anticipating more, more, more, or other, other, other.   Nor does all the literature, from the Greeks on up, that tell us to "Be here now", or --newer still - - tell us the importance of Mindfulness - - really get to one of the singular problems of being human. 

When Jim was reading Krishnamurti, he would often comment how Krishna would say that, while we call the past "the time before", and the future as "the time after", we can only go through it in time present.  "Truth," said Krishnamurti, "has no future, so path, no continuity."

If only I had been Krishnamurti. How glad I am that I was not.

When I think of the past, I realize how much change my friends and I have been through! Indeed, I notice that change is the predominent state.  If one arrests the flow for too long, the arrested moment is no good, is ridiculous, stops being remarkable. The rythm is destroyed. Change is the only territory there is.

I am in my late afternoon of life.  Carl Jung wrote about this state when he said, "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as thierto. But we cannot live the afternoon life life according to the program of life's morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."

I don't have any great tips for stopping the kind of suffering that takes up so much useless space in our minds. And, as a therapist, I've rarely met anyone who is exempt from this type of thinking. Certainly, therapists are not. And neither, for the most part, is anybody else. maybe my Uncle Neil with the lobotomy. Maybe not. Every decade a new book is written about The Now and every decade each new book's author about The Now is congratulated as if they have discovered a brand new concept.  Stop comparing. Stop wishing. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future.

Yoga? Meditation? Drugs? Bad habits? Healthy habits?

Forget going bra-less. Maybe we should go brain-less for awhile.  If only that would help.