Beating FOMO and the art of being present.
It’s a hot humid day and I’m sitting next to my wife’s hospital bed. After a hectic week of appointments and paper work, I find myself with nothing but time.
I am reading “A Promised land” – Barack Obama’s third book reflecting on his early life, career in politics and first term in the White House. Struck by how ordinary his upbringing and early life was, I found myself reflecting on my own experiences.
The strange twists and turns of everyday life that led me to this point are too many to count among the happenstance, embarrassing mistakes and naive aspirations of an idealist. I find myself in a moment of punctuation. Between jobs, trapped in slow motion. Watching. Waiting.
All the machinery of routine is silent. The inertia of the working week dissipated.
Nothing but this moment and what I choose to do with it.
It is startling to realise I have had this same agency for most of my life. It is easy to lose the simplicity and clarity of my choices as I am pulled along by the requirements of adult life – the next bill to pay, the next task forced on me by some unseen hand of fate.
How many decisions have I made considering nothing but my fear of missing out, or a sense that this must be the logical next step? Heaps. Heaps and heaps of decisions where I’ve just defaulted to being pulled along by an implacable current I don’t understand or even question.
In this moment, I quietly make peace with the past, it’s gone. Perhaps I made some wrong turns. No, I definitely did. So what. My mistakes define me as much as my successes. The future is unknown. Full of possibility. What I have is now. What will I do with it?
I am reminded of an approach my wife and I came up with while we were dating to deal with challenging situations.
- Show up.
- Be yourself.
- One out of two isn’t bad.
That’s the thing about being present – it’s simple.
We adult humans are complex and aspire to be sophisticated and it gets us into all sorts of trouble.
I think I’m going to try just being a person, and see what happens.
