Presentness
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The first major change is that retirement forces me to be present. I grew up with a conception of retirement as an earthly afterlife of sorts. You study hard, you work hard, and you raise your kids to do the same. You do all that so that when you hit 65, you get to retire off of the fruits of all your hard labor and live happily ever after for the rest of your life.
In the past, I could easily brush off any problems with, “Ah yeah this sucks for now, but one day I’ll be retired and everything will be great. I just have to make it till then.” Well, now I’m retired, and some things still suck. I can’t punt my problems off to a happily-ever-after fairy tale future anymore — I am in that happily-ever-after fairy tale future. This is what happily-ever-after looks like, and this is the future I’ve been looking forward to my entire life. What do I do now that I’m here?
I’ve been slowly figuring that out. I finally found the word for it when I went with a friend to a meditation retreat: “presentness.” I’d heard of it before as an appreciation for the present, as a way of being in the moment. It is exactly that, but the framing they gave me at the meditation retreat was new to me. “You’ve arrived,” they said (paraphrased). “You’ve made it. You finally got to where you need to be. You’re here now. The goal isn’t somewhere in the future. The goal is right here and now, and you’ve already attained it.”
Holy shit. It’s such a simple message in retrospect, but I’ve literally never heard that before in my life. Nobody has ever told me that I’ve already accomplished everything I needed to accomplish in life. Nobody’s ever told me that I’ve long completed my main quest: all I needed to do was mark it as completed. All I’ve ever heard from family, school, and work was “Work hard at X today and one day wonderful thing Y will happen.” I’ve once even had a friend bemoan how he had to study through four grueling years of university just for one single day of happiness during graduation, and then it was off to grad school for more years until the next single day of happiness.
I understand why that message was so strongly hammered into me. It is highly conducive to survival after all, and the most powerful institutions and cultures that exist tend to be the ones that prioritize the survival of their power. I mean, just imagine a country going, “We’re already where we need to be as a country. We no longer care about hitting future growth projections on our former trajectory to make ourselves great again.” Access to capital would dry up so fast as investors flee for places with better growth prospects. But as important as such a message may be for survival, it’s not conducive to thrival, and I personally find mere survival to be rather meaningless if there’s not going to be thrival at some point as well.
If it were just this message alone, the meditation retreat may not have had much of a lasting impact on me. It’s a nice idea, but of course we should continue to work towards a better future, and if that better future is just around the corner, then it’s kind of hard for me to appreciate the stupid shitty present. Good ideas that are hard to integrate into practical daily life don’t stick around.
That’s where this other message comes in: “The Future may be better, but if you don’t learn to appreciate the Present as it is right now, you’re not going to have the skills to appreciate that better Future either once it too becomes the Present.” That’s fucking genius! Instead of having to forcefully rip out the “Do X now for future Y reward” drive that’s been so ingrained in me over the decades, this second message simply subverts it with its own momentum like a masterful Judo move.
That powerful one-two punch of “Here now is the only place I need to get to” and “Appreciate the present for the sake of the future” has allowed me to continue living my life as-is, with everything still in the exact same place as it was before, but with a far greater sense of effortless freedom. Even now, I’m writing this very sentence in a waking moment that will not live to see the final publishing of this blog post in a few days’ time. But that doesn’t mean I need to wait for the post’s publishing to retroactively confer meaning upon this present moment. (It seems I’d almost, but not quite, stumbled on this idea last year.) It took me literally my entire life to get to this present moment, and now I’m finally here just in time to savor the experience of typing the middle of a draft blog post in an unsaved text editor tab. Ahh, that is such a part of what it means to be alive.
It is the Cosmic Joke of looking everywhere for the meaning of life, just to realize that you’ve been holding it in your hand all along. (I’ve actually briefly done that before with my house keys.) This ancient piece of wisdom was fucking revolutionary to me. I can’t believe they don’t teach this in schools. Since discovering it, I’ve found all sorts of joy in wearily walking up the final flight of stairs to my apartment at night, in drunkenly fumbling around with and jiggling my keys into the lock, in waiting for a friend who is running quite late with all sorts of amusing excuses — these are all such vibes that you can only get by being alive as a human in a time when stairs and locks and text messages exist. Even the moment when I’d just realized I was salivating so much over being present for the stairs that I’d completely forgotten to actually be present for the stairs — even that specific recursively ironic moment was such a delectable one to be present for. History books can detail the causal turns of the past, photos and videos can stimulate your audiovisual imagination, but if you truly want the vibes for yourself, you simply have to be here for that. There’s just no other way. Only you here right now can ever fully know how it feels to be you here right now.
That’s crazy, man. I can’t believe I’ll be dead one day — in fact, I am already dead at any spacetime coordinate you pick past the year 2100 — and yet right now I’m very consciously experiencing how the universe is at the coordinates ⟨13°21’44”N, 103°51’35”E, 1749444321⟩. (I know, those coordinates can only reliably identify me relative to Earth between January 1st 1970 and January 29th 2038.) I’m a dead man talking. Or well, typing. That’s nuts.
As life-shattering as such revelations may have been for me, they bounced harmlessly off of a friend I told them to. And that’s fair. I think the message of “You’re already enough” would’ve appealed a lot less to the younger me of my early twenties, who was itching to make something of himself in this world. I find that true humility, like true pride, is earned. In my case, it was earned through great striving and struggle, to finally succeed in getting my executive dysfunction under wraps just enough to truly shoot my very best shot at ZAMM — and to come away from that shot with nothing more than the ashes of my dreams, underneath which I uncovered a silver medal with the word “Humility” engraved deep onto its face. I am damn proud of how I earned my medal — in fact, when I flipped it over, I found that the opposite face had the word “PRIDE” emblazoned in resplendent gold. With such a prized artifact now in my possession, I can finally accept these messages and rest in peace.