Tag: fantasy

It’s Time For Now

Hamar Williams1 Comment

It is such a shame that the idea of living in the moment has been flogged to death. It’s past the point of cliché. It’s such a shame because it’s also something that is of such importance. Recently I have been attempting to practice this and have had far more actual and empirically measurable success than ever before. It seems strange to suggest it is something measurable because it is something you experience without a computer scanning your brain waves. You feel it though and it is measurable because your conscious mind can compare it to previous memories of experience.

Recently I have been able to bring my head out of the clouds. The clouds were anxious one revolving around the stresses of a man soon to turn thirty-five and with little to show for it in a conventional sense. What we must always remember is that we are not alone in this world and undoubtedly somewhere someone is feeling very similar emotions to us in this moment. We are never alone in our worries, people have been there before and others will be there in the future. But the actualities are not important, the point is that we lose ourselves in our mind and struggle to exist in the moment. While I am thinking about the enormity of the future and the size of the task of achievement ahead of me I am not experiencing anything that life gives me while I am sitting on this boat, or spending time with friends or family, or walking up the mountain, or whatever it is.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have just spent the last half an hour coming up with a pretty spectacular plan for this time next year involving hitchhiking through Patagonia, and sailing to Antarctica or the Chilean fjords on the west, or both. This escapism into fantasy may be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than embracing the anxiety of sorting ones life out but it is equally as pointless. Of course we have to come up with plans to make anything happen but it’s important not to spend more time in them than is absolutely necessary. The moment this happens it is nothing more than escapism.

What of the success I mentioned earlier then. It’s not ground breaking. Somehow you need to find a way to step back, to centre yourself. It is as if you step out of your mind for a second, observing yourself. See your surroundings and understand you’re not in that future, you’re not taking on the entire task of fixing life there and then, or you’re not sailing fjords. Step back and see what your eyes see, what your ears can hear, nose can smell. You just come back into yourself for a second and in the process break the chain, the flow the mind was rambling on in in it’s old habit. Then you realise all you have is today, and think what you can do in this moment, today, how to achieve whatever it is the mind has been intoxicated with all this time. You can’t do anything more than you can do now, you take it one step, one day at a time. That is all, that is all you can do. Nothing else is important, but when the time comes for it to be so you’ll deal with it then, one step, one day at a time. Even then we still procrastinate, it doesn’t stop us being lazy, we continue to put things off but at least we only have to deal with little things as they come. In time who knows, that’s the future, it’s conjecture, it’s still nothing more than a fantasy. It’s not now, it’s not real.

What Now Then Plan Man

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Life is full of lessons. Every day if we choose to look we would see them and one way or another learn something. This year for many has been a learning experience like no other, not more or less than other things but certainly unique. There is nobody who could have predicted what has happened and nobody who couldn’t have learnt at least something from it. The last twenty-four hours has thrown another spanner in my face, or even in the works, let’s call it both.

Strangely enough very little has actually changed. I am supposed to go out to Greece to do a little renovation work on someones boat mid-September. I was going to do a little sailing with a friend for the first week and then work for three. The three was the limit because I had tickets for a comedy show on the 15th October from an already postponed Jonathan Pie performance from April. Unfortunately in the last twenty-four hours all has changed. For family reasons my friend has cancelled the sailing and because of this virus the show has been postponed yet again, this time to May next year. Third time lucky? Perhaps it would be wise not to plan.

That’s it though really isn’t it. Some lessons sneak up on us but some we’re fully aware of as we step into and experience them. Without a doubt I’m fully aware of the futility of planning. I say futility because my track record of never sticking to my plans makes them pointless. One reason I never stick to them is not because I don’t do anything but is down to my acting on a whim as things happen. It makes me wonder if the planning is to create a safety net in my mind as well as allow me to escape and fantasise when life is not so interesting. Currently life is interesting in certain respects but with it being unfulfilling in others I can’t deny I don’t let my mind run sometimes.

This year has made planning anything a complete waste of time. Strangely enough I actually really enjoyed lockdown because I knew I had no options, I was trapped in one place and you can’t make plans when nothing can happen. Traditionally having no options would be a problem but perversely being aware of and being lucky enough to have many creates a different type of pressure and stress altogether. This disappeared and while lockdown brought up different problems, at least the one of options was a weight off my back. “Poor you” I hear you saying and you would be right as there are people trapped and miserable all around the world but stress and weight on you back is still stress and weight on your back.

Anyway, despite little really changing my plans have gone up in smoke once more and something else will happen. Interestingly something else always happens and we just make the most of it as it does. Think of this year and all the new things people have done for example. That’s the beauty of a flexible approach to life but somehow even when that is clearly the way we still manage waste so much time and energy living in little fantasies of what could happen or be happening. It really is so difficult living in the present moment. And to just give an example, I have barely even been present while writing this, the whole time has been spent fantasising about spending the winter diving and sailing in the Canary Islands. The first step to overcoming a problem is to acknowledge the existence of the problem. I have a problem.

To Wash Or To Dream

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I spoke the other day about being present when drinking your coffee or smoking your cigarette. Not only does it allow you to enjoy it more but the act of being present and the resulting benefits to body and mind are invaluable. Today I spent eight hours cleaning bread baskets. It’s not an overly taxing job as there’s a machine you put them in that does all the hard work but without doubt it is monotonous and you spend most of the day being painfully aware of the enormous pile that never seems to get any smaller. In times of monotony we have a habit, or at least I have a habit, of dreaming of adventures in foreign lands, things I would like to incorporate into my life or simply what I fancy eating for my dinner. Today was no different and while some may argue these are great chances to have a really good think about stuff, and there are credible arguments to suggest there is truth in that, it doesn’t allow for the exercise of being present in the moment if you’re living in fantasy land.

Buddhist monks have written, I know because I have seen it, that we should put as much attention into the most menial of tasks as we do the most important of tasks. If we are capable of this, when we really need to focus and be present for something, we are far more practised and it is far easier. That seems to make sense as it can be hard to switch things on and off. On top of that if we are living in fantasy land, or making plans as it’s commonly known, then we’re as far from being present as possible. That of course may not be the aim of life but it’s not a bad thing to try and incorporate a little.

But as I said fantasising can be fun and let’s be honest imagining you’ll be sailing in the sun of Greece soon or sitting on a Costa Rican beach probably trump being stuck away in the north-east of England in the corner of a bakery getting wet monotonously. It would be nice going to Costa Rica though, I’ve heard a great deal about it and it seems like a good place for me to rediscover my love of travel. Plans this year have been somewhat difficult with all these virus shenanigans. In someways it’s been good to break the habit of just disappearing on a foreign adventure the moment I fancy a change from whatever the norm is and knowing planning is pointless, has made me do far less of it which allows me to step out of my head a little more often. Is that a win, just maybe. Did it prevent me dreaming instead of meditatively focusing on each basket, well no of course it didn’t I’m not a Buddhist monk. Alas, one more time I become aware I am but a simple and fallible human.

What Could Have Been

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The one important thing to remember when we’re worrying or being down on ourselves is that we’re not alone. While our lives are unique there are similarities with others; we’ve all loved or hated someone, worried about something that has been fine or has been a complete failure, regretted doing or not doing things, enjoyed our own company and been painfully bored, and so on and so on. Emotional similarities are easier to point to because we can all say we’ve experienced a moment of happiness. This happiness is comparative to less happy moments in our lives and we’ve all experienced happier and comparatively less happier moments. I imagine me running down the beach is not unique but also not everyone has done this. We can always shape a feeling to fit.

Today then I experienced the emotion of regret. I regretted an inaction in my past and the course my life has taken as a result. I was listening to a podcast with a chef and a restaurant owner discussing cooking, food, techniques, food as art etc and I remembered a desire I had when I was about sixteen to become a chef and open a restaurant in Dublin. That was my plan. I’ve persuaded myself that the only reason I didn’t do it was because I was persuaded against it, that life as a chef is volatile and hard work. In reality there are an infinite number of reasons life didn’t take that course, one of them being that I just did something else. But I felt regret, that I should have done that instead of whatever I did do. I can admit this because like I said, we’ve all experienced the same emotion and probably a few out there over that exact scenario.

The truth is though that the mind plays many tricks on us and in this case I craved an idea. It is nothing more than an idea, and worse than that it’s a fantasy of an idea. We imagine this situation, what could have been and it’s always perfect. Life isn’t necessarily bad, I have it good in many ways but like everyone we have days which vary in degrees of satisfaction. In times like today we fantasise, but that’s all it is, it’s a fantasy and it’s not real. I then later dreamt of being a writer and after that an actor.

I don’t say any of this in a bad way, as I write this I don’t feel sad. Of course what ifs are not always fun and don’t always signify positivity but they’re just examples of one version out of an infinite versions of possible realities. We also don’t know whether we would have survived in that version, perhaps I would have had a heart attack by now from all the rich restaurant food I was eating. I would probably be much fatter than I am, but as a chef I would also be on a steady diet of amphetamines so that would have probably cut my appetite considerably. It’s fun to explore these moments but also not worth taking them too seriously. There’s a reason we never made it happen then and despite the fantasising now, there’s a reason we’re not rushing off to do it anytime soon. And it’s not likely because we can’t.

Think Quick Proud Man

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I had an interesting interaction today and it made me think about how we instinctively respond to people and how we then spend the next hour fantasising about how we would like to have responded to them. In truth it wasn’t even a big thing and I didn’t really dwell on it but it reminded me of times in the past I have. I will explain what happened. At work I had to go and pick up something from one place and take it to another because they had run out, I won’t bore you with those details. When I asked for them the woman in the shop asked “Why?”, I said “because they had run out of them”, she then asked whether there were none at all in the stores and I confirmed there were none at all, she went and got them as she had a lot to spare. Quite a nothing conversation but she didn’t need to ask why or quiz me on whether there were any in the stores, I wouldn’t have asked for some if they hadn’t run out which seems obvious or if there were any in the stores, and her why was not necessarily friendly inquisitive but not overly rude either. I responded in my usually unthreatening way and I left with what I was after.

Afterwards however the mind takes over. It starts to point out that I didn’t need to explain myself or why I was after what I was after, and I wished then that I had said this to her. I then thought about people I know who would have responded in that manner and envied them, wondering what it was that made them capable of doing that and not me. Are people just quick thinking, are they permanently on the defensive, are they permanently on the attack, are they just prepared from past fantasies of their own. In the moment I didn’t even notice anything, it was just a normal interaction. I don’t go into situations defensively or aggressively and while I may fantasise and wish I pulled people up more often when they’re being rude, in the moment these things happen I rarely give an actual shit. I’ve heard it said that the ego takes over afterwards, that the true self is the person who responds in the moment. Maybe there’s some truth in that as it’s only ever my pride which whines and fantasises after events, it rarely exists in these moments as they happen. Or maybe it does and I’m just caught off guard. I’m evidently not an instinctive fighter always on alert though, and I don’t know if I want to be in truth. Anyway, enough of this, if I carry on about it too much I may just convince myself I am bothered and really what’s the point in that.