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I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about the future. This is not an achievement or a creed. The future is just really hard to make out. (I do keep a careful calendar, exactly because everything after right now is so unintelligible.) It cracked me up when I interviewed for a job at The New York Times some 12 years ago and got asked several times what I’d like to do there. I just wanted to do the job I was applying for! That would be a huge break for me, and it was. Most planning in my life up till then, things like deciding to apply out of state for college or to live in Los Angeles, had tended to happen on a horizon of months at most.
They still do. Yet this chapter of life is anchored by things with a built-in future orientation: running a marathon, writing a novel, learning to teach yoga. It’s not that I’m waiting for those things to be done, but a kind of reverse: Their getting done depends on what I do now. Without now, there can’t be a then.
Another future tug is in the mix, the recognition that big, relatively stable factors are becoming less stable in ways and at a range we can see and are already reckoning with—the climate, liberal democracy, the margin between us and A.I.’s long-promised upheaval. The future might not be all good or all bad, but it will be weird. And the weirding is hard to look away from.
I was grateful to note this week how much satisfaction I’m finding in this little locus between what I do know (the past) and what I can’t (the future). The days resemble one another, not because I’m stranded but because four decades of life have issued some stern lessons about what is and isn’t possible, what is and isn’t rewarding, and what is and isn’t safe. And I have to some degree taken note of these and adjusted.
One of the lessons, or something I derived, is that the arrival of a desired future state is not as important—not as relevant, and never as satisfying—as the integrity and savor of the present. I know this sounds like a cliche, but that’s only because it’s so elementally true. Any future arrives by way of now. Now is determinative. It is worth getting now right.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.