Some people wait all week for Friday,
They wait all year for summer
And they wait all their lives for happiness.
To a certain extent we are all guilty of this type of approach to life. Many people go through their lives thinking things like:
- Everything will be wonderful when I finally finish decorating the house.
- I’ll be happy when I’ve got that new job and I’m making more money.
- If I can find a new partner who really cares for me then life will be perfect.
These are our goals and aspirations but none of these thing are really true. Our happiness is not dependent on something happening in our future. Happiness happens in the present, it’s is a NOW thing.
Thoughts like the ones above show how much we tend to live our lives in the future and not in the present. We focus on how life will be when we’ve achieved something. The truth is that achieving the goal will only make us happy for a short amount of time. The new situation we find ourselves in once we’ve got what we want, will soon become ordinary and familiar and then we’ll look for the next goal that will make us happy.
The other side of ‘future living’ is worry:
- Oh no! What’s going to happen if he/she leaves me?
- Things are getting worse and we’re slowly running out of money.
- My health in not getting any better. What’s life going to be like in 5 or 10 years time?!
Again none of these bad things are GOING to happen, they MIGHT happen but at best we can only guess at what our future will bring. In the meantime we waste our lives focusing on the future, letting the happiness we so desperately seek, slip away. Happiness can only happen in the present moment and when we focus on the future we only receive fleeting glimpses of that happiness.
We’ve all met someone who seems to spend their entire life living in the past. They focus on how great things USED to be, how life was in the good old days. It can be extremely difficult coping with an elderly relative that spends their whole life reminiscing. However, living in the future is just as bad as living in the past and yet, in our frantic world, it seems to be accepted as ‘normal’ to be consumed by anxiety or worry, or being super stressed because of our goal obsession.
We can only feel happimness in the present moment so, if we want to experience more happiness in our lives, we need to stay focused in the present. That means finding a way of enjoying whatever we’re doing right now.
For me the Dalai Lama usually puts things in a way I can understand:
Man sacrifices his health in order to make money
Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present: The result being that he does not live in the present or the future.
He lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Learn to live in the now, come along to my Mindfulness and Stress seminar at Waipuna Hotel and Conference Centre, Mt Wellington, on 29th November from 10am – 1pm. Click here to book