“Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?”… Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything.
“Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?”
“I think that sums it up, yes,” said Garry. (Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman)
Do you ever get a feeling that life hasn’t begun yet? That someday you’ll finally be finished with everything you need to get out of the way and your real life will begin?
I feel this underlying sense of foreboding that someday I’ll get to a point where I can finally live the life I want to. This isn’t to say that I don’t have a great life, I have a wonderful life. But since I stumbled into adulthood I’ve had this impression that I’m waiting for my real life to begin.
Marie-Louise von Franz called this the “provisional life.”
There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.
I wonder if this stems from childhood. When you’re a kid you have big dreams, you see the future as this incredible movie playing out before your eyes every day. But then you become an adult and you realize that life mostly consists of sitting at a desk, paying bills, and wishing you could get more sleep.
Maybe that’s a cynical way of seeing things, but the reality of adulthood paints a stark contrast to the dreams of childhood. This contrast can result in us still feeling like someday we’ll wake up and be living the life we always imagined.
By always looking forward to the future, we are deferring our happiness. We work hard and tell ourselves that we are putting in our time now so we can do whatever we want later. Is the hope of happiness in the future worth trading the happiness you could have now?
Deferring happiness indefinitely to move towards some unknowable idyllic future is a recipe for a miserable life. Happiness can be found here, now.
Enjoying life is about finding moments where my feet and head are in the same place—being present.
When you are fully present there is no opportunity for you to look forward to a future that doesn’t exist.
Live in the present, cherish these moments.
Your real life is here right now, live it.