How to live in the present … and not go nuts

By Patricia hunt
Published: October 10, 2008

Yesterday my cat leaped on a line of string lying on the floor, treating it as if it were living prey. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that she is 18 years old and fading away from failing kidneys. She purrs and snuggles but rarely plays anymore. The very same day, my elderly hound, Oscar, was in an unusually frisky mood, bouncing around on the rug full of his old vigor. Where was this fresh burst of energy coming from? Was it the changing weather? Clearly neither of them had been reading the business section of the paper.

I decided to take a cue from them. If they could be joyful, why not me? All the news may be bad, but the weather is glorious. I do have decisions to be made, business to be taken care of, but dare I be so extravagant as to waste a perfectly good fall?

All the wisdom literature counsels that we can’t change the past, and tomorrow isn’t here yet, so we must live in the present. My friend Marsha and I used to try to figure out how you can live as if you were going to die tomorrow and live as though you were going to last to a hundred. How do you make decisions that will work no matter which of those possibilities happen … or anything in between? It isn’t a problem my cat and dog have to consider. This moment is the only place they can live.

I sometimes wonder if I am not living in the moment too much. When Thomas Jefferson was alive, he got news considerably after it happened. Communications weren’t good. Poor man, he never got to see the O.J. Simpson car chase on television. By the time he got news, something had already been done about the situation. Maybe a good something, maybe a bad something, but it wasn’t exactly news anymore.

Parents used to have the advantage of bad communication when dealing with the crises of children away at summer camp or college. Children wrote letters that took days to arrive. If they wrote that they were hated by other campers or were about to fail college chemistry, the children might well have it all worked out before the letter hit their parents’ mailbox.

Not so today. Today you know about it NOW, whatever “it” is. We’ve paid a high price in anxiety for this instant communication. We may be living in the present far too much. We find it harder to take the long view. Our children rely on us more for minute-to-minute encouragement and guidance. The present looms larger than it actually is because people on TV or the other end of the phone line are insisting that we pay attention NOW. So sometimes I envy Jefferson up there on his mountaintop without a clue as to what was going on in Washington, let alone Paris or London. It makes me wonder how differently we might have regarded 9/11 if we had read about it a week later instead of seeing it as it happened, and then seeing it replayed over and over again. It would have been important and shocking in any case, but exactly how would we have regarded it had we been in Jefferson’s situation with no photos and delayed delivery of the news? I simply don’t know.

I don’t think human beings have adjusted to the overload of news we are getting instantly. For almost as long as there have been humans, the only news people got instantly was what was happening to them. That was enough to deal with! Now we know what is happening all around the globe, and it may be driving us nuts. We haven’t figured out how to absorb the onslaught of bad news.

A wise friend has decided on a strategy. Long plagued with anxieties, he has fastened on a mantra of sorts. No matter what happens, his response is, “Isn’t that interesting?” Lost socket wrench? Isn’t that interesting! Stock market plummets? Isn’t that interesting! I guess it wouldn’t work for the death of his best friend, but nothing works all the time. I think I am going to try it.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.