You check the boxes. You pay the bills and do the laundry. You think, “this is adulting, right? I'm doing it now, right?” You have a love/hate/need relationship with social media. With Netflix. With your phone. You want to give up everything and move to the mountains. You want to become a hermit and never have an internet connection ever again and live authentically and never feel that you're not doing it right. Or that you're not good enough.
You checked boxes off for so long, that now you start to wonder if the dread, the sense that something is missing, is just another box for you to put an emphatic check into. You watch others go through the same things and you see the articles and blogs. “Ok,” you think, “maybe the death of wonder in my life is something I can work with. Maybe this existential hole will be the inspiration for my next blog post.”
You feel transparent. Like people are looking past all of your accomplishments and hard work, straight to the truth: that you can't follow through with the things you want to do, the things that you want to make. That you feel hardened in some incalculable way against beauty. Against what used to inspire you. Against almost everything. Against yourself.
It's a special talent of human beings to look ahead. To set a trap and catch an animal. To plant a seed and wait for a flower to bloom. To imagine the future. To connect a finite life to the thought of an infinite being.
But we’re not supposed to use this power to distract or numb ourselves from the now. I think we sense this, and that's why we want to go up to the mountain – to get away from all of the easy distractions. But even if we did go, and leave everything behind, we would still bring ourselves, and the headspace of an imagined future. Hundreds of miles away from any civilization, we could still be clinging to the future.
Most people are sentimental about childhood because if there's one thing children know, it’s how to live in the present. You don't learn to ride a bike or how to swim by imagining those things. You learn by doing. But if your parents don't pay for karate lessons or sign you up for the soccer team, you don't learn those things. Instead, for children, living in the present means learning from the circumstances you find yourself in.
Fast-forward to picking your own job, apartment, and car. Now you are responsible. It's your fault if it isn't perfect. If it isn't effortless. Except for this: every good thing in your life is a gift. You worked for it but that doesn't mean it still wasn't given to you.
While you spend all this time in the headspace of imagined future, there are uncountable moments in the present waiting for you – not just to live through them, but to live them well. This… this is your moment. The annoying chores and tasks are your opportunities. Not to love them, but to understand them as gifts. Opportunities. To live them well, not halfheartedly.
To live your mundane moments well is art. Is beautiful. Is good. To live well is to reawaken yourself to the beauty of the world through gratitude and sacrifice. To live well is to live engaged, and to live engaged is the deep yearning of the human heart.
