Here now.

Not there then, not yet!

Not yet there, then.

I’ve been watching my mind spiral into the future more than I’d prefer. Maybe it’s the warmer weather, spring equinox, the promise of new growth. Mostly, I’m feeling irritated that I don’t know the specific answers to what I’m thinking and dreaming and planning for. The film of my life is developing too slowly, I’d like to see it now.

Really — what will happen in three months? And in six to nine months, and when I finish this class, and where are all of these projects leading, and should I go on an adventure, and what would that be? I want to just read and write all day and ugh why can’t I just do that now. And why didn’t I accept that grad school invitation, I could’ve been a year away from being locked and loaded for my entire professional life. Certainty! Security!

Should I have … ?

The mind tries to use wistful thinking to incite regret. It carries the energy of ‘oh, I could have had that thing, but I chose differently. I wonder if I’d gone that direction, would I be happier/more secure/etc.? Oh, I wish I could’ve been satisfied with what I knew was wrong for me. Because now I wouldn’t be feeling lonely and anxious about what’s coming to fill its place. Because obviously, if I’d done the thing that was wrong for me, I’d be happier. The mind is devotedly bananas.

These plaintive past reflections are balanced by the wisdom (and frustration) that everything is impermanent and nothing can be guaranteed.

So all we can do? Is be here now.

Last year around this time, I told my roommate very seriously that I was moving back to California. They were so kind and supportive and also like, hmm, don’t you like it here though. Three weeks later I discovered that wait, I do have a really sweet and fun life here in Chicago. And I don’t actually have to leave? I can let myself be happy? (Why are we prone to running from goodness?)

I’m much more afraid of stagnancy than I am of the chaos that change brings. I can handle a crisis, fine — but a lackluster, boring life? Get me out.

I’m learning that things “feeling good” is not always a signal that I am being a complacent sheep and instead maybe I just deserve to live with joy when joy is here. So I’m pairing my longing for adventure and newness with remembering that the life I’m living is rich and beautiful right now. I don’t know what’s coming yet, but I’m here, now, ok.

Here now.

“we’re all used to having plans, and the inability to let go of our plan in the new moment leaves us strangely out of sync with everything…you end up destroying what new thing could be, because you can’t hear it, because of your attachment to your old model.” - Ram Dass

When you are wedded to the future, you miss out on the beauty that is here now. When you are fixated on what might happen or what you *think* you want to happen, you mess with the natural growth of what is going to happen.

Ram Dass also says of our plans and relationships: “how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?”

I don’t want to corrupt the organic cycles of my life by over-planning or overthinking. I have to trust that by participating fully and intentionally in this moment, I am creating a future more true and beautiful than what I left behind, and beyond the bounds of what my current mind can imagine.

We keep dreaming big and wide (because that’s how we grow) — and then we surrender to what is here now.

Again and again and again.

xx, maggie

p.s. thanks for reading, share if you feel like it!

Also, you can listen to my podcast with Jackson! In episode 3 “Is this a sign?” we talk about receiving/interpreting signs from our higher selves.