Talking to a colleague I have tried to explain why we should not live in the future and what are the consequences of doing so. After listening, he was disagreeing saying that we have to plan our future and we cannot live only in the present.
Let’s me explain and make clear what is the difference between planning and living in the future. For instance, we want to build or buy a house. We start making plans and calculation to figure out what is the best option and what we can afford without getting into much trouble. So, what is wrong with that? Well, everything is fine as long as we do not live in that house way before it is built. What is becoming a habit for every one of us, is that we have become attached to our plans. We cannot stop thinking how lovely would be living in our new house and how happy we would be. That attachment is what we call living in the future. We are conditioning our happiness and peace with an event that may happen or not in the future, and the thought that may not happen becomes torture for us every single day. We become attached to an expectation that is nothing more than an illusion that we have created. That one of the examples, but the list may continue indefinitely. We become anxious just by thinking we can get sick or alarming ourselves by the news that a new financial crisis is imminent. All these thoughts are the pattern of an unhappy life and the mechanism that contributes to a state of panic and war with ourselves.
Now that we clarify the concept of living in the future, we can start thinking constructively about how we can stop that. First, we should live in the present and be happy for the life we have. If we consider anything that happens to us experience and we become observers, we can attain the state of happiness. No more attachments, no more entertaining our thoughts and we can make the jump to self-realization.
We come again to the same lessons: letting go and acceptance. Same as is happening in meditation when our thoughts surface we must let them go. We can do that since this behavior is an acquired one. As I have talked with children, they do not tend to follow or getting lost in their thoughts. We, the adults, do that almost every minute while driving, eating or sitting on a bench in the park. That behavior must be unlearned, and we can do it with the help of meditation. It is doable for every human being without exception.