I have a couple of friends, married to one another, both of whom I knew and cared about before they got together. They are very, very different from each other, and explored those differences during their relationship prior to deciding to marry. One day were were sitting around after dinner, talking about childhood and about the future, and C. said, “I think the future always has the potential to be better than the past. I get to create the future, make decisions and take action to make it better.” S. said, “But I want to go back to the past, to the beautiful days, to when I had fewer obligations and more time for play. The future is just work and more work, and you never know what bad thing might happen next.”
Reader, I’m with S. I’m afraid I’ve always been, or at least since I was 10 and one of the greatest cataclysms of my life occurred: my parents sold the horse farm that was the only home I remembered, and we moved into town.
I read once that people who tend towards depression, like me, usually yearn for the past, and people who tend towards anxiety usually lean towards the future. It makes sense; when you’re depressed, you’re convinced nothing good will ever happen again. And when you’re anxious, you’re not only thinking about the future, but about what you can do to control it, to prevent bad things from happening.
Buddhist thinking would point out that both of these perspectives cause discomfort, because we can’t go back to the past and we can’t control the future. Bad things will happen. Yes, we live in a culture that sells us on the illusion of controlling the future—insurance, for example, sells itself by being one of the few things you can do to make that potential future less awful, and the American myth that “anyone can be rich and successful through hard work” keeps us on the wheel with the bonus of making us feel inadequate when we don’t get rich or succeed.
What solutions do we have for the pain of yearning for the past and worrying about the future? Meditation and mindfulness, for sure, which help us focus on the present moment, the only moment we actually inhabit. For me, meditation is a break from the tug of war for my attention and emotional investment. It’s a time out that allows my mind to reset, to remember that my value as a person does not need to be proven or justified. And before you reject meditation because you “can’t empty your mind” or you’ve tried and you’re just too restless, I have to make the case for it by pointing out that no one is able to empty their mind. It’s not humanly possible; we’re not made that way. But we can practice gently pulling our attention back to the present moment, being quiet with ourselves in a nonjudging, nonstriving way, and giving our overloaded brains a break from screen time and other noise.
But I also think there must be ways to merge grief for what we’ve lost with joy that we had it, dread of an awful future with hope for a better one. Being human is a contradictory, even paradoxical experience. For me, poetry can capture that terriblebeautiful idea, the tender rabbit heart inside that fears and fears but goes on living anyway. This poem hit my mailbox this morning, and I highly recommend it for how it addresses these contradictions.
Maybe you have other solutions for your personal contradictions—other art forms, from music to dance to comics to movies, or gardening, or sports. In any case I wonder: are you a past or a future person, and how does that leaning affect your life?
I am a future person who deals with significant anxiety the older I get. I am in my seventies and grateful to be in very good health, however so many of my contemporaries (family and friends) have already passed or are dealing with major health threats. It is difficult not to think at times what may be awaiting down the road. I have to make a concerted effort to remind myself that "it is not how old you are but how healthy you are" that hopefully results in many happy, productive years ahead. I recommend a great book about women aging by Mary Pipher: Women Rowing North, Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing as We Age. I sent her a copy of my latest chapbook and we have exchanged a few e-mails. We both see the challenges/struggles ahead but hope to stay positive. P.S. l
loved your poems!