I would like to preface this reply with two points: This Creator is brilliant and so well-spoken that I strongly encourage anyone who reads this to check this creator out. His voice is warm and inviting and his insights are, well, relentlessly positive. Also, it is with nothing but respect that I post this Tok-Bak. I wish him no disrespect at all, I just couldn’t express my thoughts in 150 characters.
Summary:
In his video, he appears to recite a piece of work from an author that he found inspiring. It is unclear if the entire piece is a quote from the other author or if this Creator expands the basic notion he felt inspired by.
The idea that he presents is that there is only the present. That we must forget the past and avoid worrying about what if, or what could have been. We shouldn’t focus or dwell on our failures or things that have happened because they are out of our control.
He makes the same claim about the future. Because it is out of our control, we should not look to the future and therefore should not setup expectations or designs for what the future should look like or what we want the future to be.
Instead, we should live in the now and celebrate the present because it is really all that we have.
This made me think about a story I had heard recently.
Monkeys Love The Present
In Africa, when a monkey comes across a wooden box with a small hole in the side of it, he inspects the box and to his pleasure, he finds a banana in it. Being a modern and well-adjusted monkey who follows the principle of living in the now, he plunges his little arm through the hole and grabs that delicious banana just like this author suggests. Way to live in the present, monkey!
Now when the monkey attempts to withdraw his arm and eat the banana, he realizes that he can’t withdraw his arm from the box. The banana is too big to fit through the hole. He gets stuck.
But because the monkey lacks the mental capacity to think about the fact that he saw some other monkeys do this in the past, he didn’t realize that this was a trap. He was so busy living in the now, that he failed to remember how poachers grabbed his friends this same way.
All the monkey could think about was the banana. But the banana was too big to come out of the small hole that the monkey’s arm went in. As a human, we’d drop the banana and pull our arms out and avoid being captured. This is especially true if we had seen our friends and relatives captured and taken away doing this. But this monkey, obsessed only with the now, will not drop the banana. This is how poachers catch monkeys in the wild.
Uniquely as humans, we would leverage our past experience to predict our future and use these two “virtual” scenes in our heads as references in making our decisions. We would drop the banana and escape capture. Monkeys that live in the now do not have that luxury.
In fact, there is no context that living in the now benefits us to the exclusion of acknowledging the past or predicting the future. This is why I disagree with the sentiment the Creator shares with us.
The Good Parts
However, what I think is important to acknowledge in the Creator’s sentiment is that we often forget about the present because we are spending all of our energy and time feeling upset about the past.
The Creator is right, we cannot control the past and what’s done is done so it is the fool’s folly to obsess about it. I agree that we must not dwell on our past, especially our failures or successes. The irony is that dwelling on the past costs you the now.
The Not-So-GoodParts
But the creator claims that we cannot control the future and though he is right in the technical sense, it obscures any sort of agency that we have over our own lives. To practice this belief that there is no predictable future would be to render us unable to move–caught in the inevitable knowledge that no matter what we do or don’t do, we cannot influence the future. This is counterproductive and most assuredly the wrong approach.
So what is the solution?
- We have established that living in the now will get you caught by poachers.
- We have established that living in the past robs you of your enjoyment of the now.
- We have established that predicting the future is futile and like living in the past, robs you of the now.
What’s left?
What’s left is to understand that one of the most amazing things about being human is the virtual worlds that we create in our minds. Starting at around age 5, we begin constructing a brilliant world in our heads that acts like a stage in which we are mostly in control. We acknowledge some things are completely out of our control for the most part, but how people act and what people do is all up to us.
We draw from our past experience and plot a future that allows us to avoid the pitfalls we faced or heard about previously. And though our future is almost never exactly like the one we predict, our future is always better than the one in which we completely ignore our past and fail to predict a future.
What I want to encourage this creator to consider is that the past is so valuable in that it presents a foundation of knowledge that we can use to maximize our enjoyment of the present. We need to pay special attention to avoid dwelling in the virtual headspace of our past and we need to focus on living in the now. We need to use our past experiences to inform our decisions in the now as we move towards a future that is better. We use our past experience to inform the virtual headspace of our future in the hopes of moving forward and living a better life. This motivates us to take action in the now.
But most important is that we need to understand and accept that the past is virtual–it exists within the context of our minds. The future is even more virtual and it also exists only within the context of our minds. Both of these virtual headspaces lack the detail and beauty of the now. Both the future and the past are carved down to their most essential essence by our mind that uses these two sets of thoughts like weights on the end of a tightrope walker’s pole. If we focus on one too much, we will lose balance. Focus on the other, the same.
So the answer, in my opinion, is to cherish the knowledge we gain from our past experiences, to use this knowledge to plot a path to a brighter future, and to inform our choices in the present based on these two important aspects of our life.
Focus on the now informed by our knowledge of the past and our plan for the future.
Here is the wonderful video with a wonderful, but slightly inapplicable sentiment in question: