A Deepening Appreciation of the Now

What percentage of your life is spent trying to manipulate the future or rationalize the past? How often and how deeply do you simply sit back and appreciate the now? It is these moments, often spent in silence and wonder, that create memories that fill a lifetime.

I think of this as I pause all-too-briefly at home in Montana (currently spending my last hours in Missoula at my ex-girlfriend’s apartment). It’s been a busy summer of work and travels and I have an around the world journey yet ahead of me. It’s Thursday now and I’ll be on a trans-Atlantic flight Monday morning. I find myself grateful for the little things in this tiny little box of time. A walk with an old friend. Lying in bed, watching the morning light paint lines across a lover’s body. Letting the pace of life come to a halt, if only for a moment or two before the phone rings, duties intrude, and again the delicate now is enveloped in to-do lists, planning, and double-checking.

I’m 30 now, and perhaps the greatest blessing of this is the realization that even though ‘all that should be accomplished’ by this age has not been, it’s okay. There were times in my life when I thought I had it all. And each of these were, in retrospect, times of relatively high delusion, followed by clinging and suffering. The ‘letting go’ part of life, when things change abruptly or unexpectedly, is hard for all of us. But it is also the only way we can grow and truly flourish.

Interestingly, a friend just sent me an article on “emerging adulthood” – supposedly a new aspect of 20-something life, but also stringing into the 30s for many.

Just as adolescence has its particular psychological profile, Arnett says, so does emerging adulthood: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.” A few of these, especially identity exploration, are part of adolescence too, but they take on new depth and urgency in the 20s. The stakes are higher when people are approaching the age when options tend to close off and lifelong commitments must be made. Arnett calls it “the age 30 deadline.”

My sister is a 34 year-old very successful TV producer. She spent five years working up the ladder in Los Angeles and is now living with our parents briefly. Soon she’ll move to Denver with plans to somehow reinvent herself in a middle-path between her Hollywood career ambitions and her ‘Montana gal’ needs for community, nature, and down-to-earth people. Around the time of her 30th birthday she discovered the mantra “the 30s are the new 20s.”

Perhaps it’s a feature of our increasingly complex and globalized world, but the education we get in our late teens and early 20s (ie a batchelor’s degree) no longer seems to prepare most of us for the realities of life today. The decade of our 20s is thus spent often attempting adulthood – and often failing in a sense with major career changes, early divorces and the likes. What used to be ‘settled’ at 25 is now for many of us completely up in the air at 30 or even 35.

DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their ideal istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote.  

Splendid.

Well, returning to the ‘now’, the phone just rang. It was my sister calling from my parents house, 2 hours away in Helena, wondering when I’d be there. I’ve been pondering calling another old friend for lunch before going but no, not today. I’ll finish this, grab a bite, and set out on the road. Four days with the family. Five months in India to come. Lots to to-do lists, planning, and double-checking in the meantime.