On Being Present and Thankful
I don’t know if you all noticed, but it’s been a minute since I posted anything. At first it was an unconscious choice – I just felt busy, and out of control, and needed to prioritize other things. Then it became a conscious choice, thinking “I don’t have anything to say right now, so I’m not going to say anything!” Then it became a realization that it wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, I just didn’t feel motivated. Then it became almost a challenge – can I REALLY keep my ideas to myself and just live and not worry about publishing my thoughts.
As you can see, I really can’t keep my thoughts to myself lol.
But the reason is surprising (or at least it’s surprising to me) – I really thought that it’d be something about the continuing destruction of the job market as I saw friends get laid off left and right, or about politics as we see people continue to be shot in their cars and on the streets by ICE, or about economics seeing the way the economy is roiling with the constantly changing news out of the gulf, or maybe even about AI again because I have been doing a lot of playing with AI to build productivity/life management tools for myself… but it’s none of those things.
Instead, what brought me back, was a desire to talk about living in the moment and being grateful for what you have. Which given everything that’s going on in the world (see the previous paragraph lol) feels like a silly thing to think. Things are objectively not great out there, and they don’t seem like they’re gonna get better any time soon, and yet, I feel a really heavy draw toward thinking about how I’m currently living in what I’ll look back on as really good times.
Let’s be honest before I get into this… it might just be that I’m experiencing a personally very fulfilling time and that’s why I’m feeling this way. Life feels good, it feels like even when it’s crazy we can get through it, it feels like everyone is growing and getting to a good space. We just had our eldest become a teenager, and even though both kiddos might already act somewhat like teenagers, it’s more in the sullen introverted spend time in my room and asleep way, not in the “I hate you” way.
And it also might be that I just got back from a vacation that started off with too many people then transitioned to a perfectly lovely quiet time in the mountains.
Those would all be great reasons to feel thankful and in the moment. But I think that it’s something more than that.
Life is short, and life is long. Being a human is a lesson in contradiction. In the time scale of the universe, our lives are literally nothing. A little blip. And yet, in our actual day to day, our lives can feel long. Days often feel long. Weeks feel short. Years feel short. Months feel long. It’s all a contradiction.
Einstein popularized this by discussing relativity - and the famous (if likely untrue) attribution of “a second can feel very short when looking at a beautiful woman but very long while touching a hot stove” to Einstein to discuss relativity is a very sexist if exemplary definition of relativity.
But I’m also reading the Expanse books and they often show the vastness of space and how those vast distances feel shorter and shorter as you keep expanding your scope. Earth and Mars seem close to each other when you live past the asteroid belt. And then feel even closer once you start expanding your reach beyond our solar system.
And that might be why I’m in this overly thankful and present state of mind. As we expand our purview everything seems more closely connected and intertwined because we get to see it from further and further away. Or maybe I’m just making this shit up because it sounds good. Either way works for me! Functionally, they end in the same spot. The only real difference is “which one do I feel like sounds more like me and therefore which one do I want to identify with” lol.
The most logical reason though for me feeling like I should be thankful and present is age. I’m just getting older, the kids are growing, it’s a logical time in life to start being more present. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but I’m in a privileged enough position to allow it to happen.
And what it looks like in practice isn’t exactly what I thought it’d look like. Everything in movies and tv shows that represents the best times in your life or the times people are most thankful are big and celebratory. There are people around, they’re all having a wildly fun time, things looks idyllic. And if you looked at my life it’d probably look really good! But it wouldn’t look like THAT. We’re not boisterous or loud people, we’re not partiers, we’re not likely to have a lot of people around. My wife and I prize a quiet life.
And that’s what we have. And it’s also likely another reason that I feel incredibly content and want to bask in this moment. It’s not as quiet or as calm as I’d like it to be. I’d love to win the lottery and just sit and read books and play video games and walk the dog and sit outside and just… exist (it’s so sad that if I won the lottery I think the only functional changes in my life would be to do some upgrades to things that are falling apart in the house and then I’d be done lol).
It really feels like this is just bragging now lol. But it’s not meant to be - what it’s meant to be, is a recognition that we have the capacity to enjoy our reality. It doesn’t require us to be living the best moment of our lives, it doesn’t require things to even be “good” it just requires us to be able to see things as your future self would. Which requires seeing your past self.
(I want to acknowledge once again, this is a privilege to be able to think like this. People have hard lives, and we often only see a small slice even when we see everything someone is going through externally we don’t know what’s churning inside. And some people don’t have literally anything that they can latch onto that’s positive. And that’s not a failure on their part, that’s their lived experience. I just don’t want to go through this pretending this is a universal “anyone can do it!” because that’s not fair or real.)
So how do you actually look at things as your future self? That feels like some psycho babble bullshit right?
And it might be, who knows. But let me at least give you what’s been going on in my head.
One of the great benefits of our age is that we have a fuckton of photos that document the last 13-15 years which happens to coincide with the timeline of my marriage and kiddos lives.
By having all those photos constantly showing up (I have them on a tablet in the kitchen just rotating through photos, my iPad home screen is a rotation of photos, I just scroll through my photos because I can, etc.) it makes you more nostalgic. And not all pictures document happy times, but they all document things you’ve been through. While it’s not always easy to reflect on your past, it’s an incredibly revealing process.
You have to think about the person you were, you have to think about how you reacted to situations, and you have to be really upfront with yourself about how you’ve changed (hopefully for the better).
For instance, I look back on pictures of us with little kids, and think, “I miss those little kids”. Not because they’re not here, obviously I still see them every day lol. And the people they are fucking rock. They’re so cool. But they’re not the toddlers and babies they once were, and those kids are DIFFERENT. Because we all change, and especially kids change.
Do I want to go back and relive those times? No. LOL. I’m tired enough. I don’t need to do midnight feedings, or constantly staring at a baby monitor anymore. But also, I miss them. I wish I COULD just visit and go back. Past me was super fucking lucky that he got to be on that journey.
Past me though, thought the SAME THING about photos he looked at from his past. “Oh man remember that Wii bowling party that was a fun time!” or “Remember that Ape-Con (don’t ask lol) day?! That was fun”, while ALSO still thinking “thank god that’s not me today” lol.
That perspective allows me to make an informed assumption – there will be a time where I look back on today and think “man that version of me had it good and got to have a lot of fun” as well as saying “present me is glad that isn’t my life now” lol.
That’s a blessing. It’s a freedom. It’s an acknowledgment that you can know that you’re going to be happy to never live through this moment again while ALSO being nostalgic and jealous of the version of you that got to live through it. One of my favorite pictures of my family is of the wife and I taking Eleanor to go vote for Hillary for president. It was a fucking JOYOUS moment taking our DAUGHTER to go live in a world where the president could in fact be a woman. Of course, the end of that day totally sucked, but the people that got to live through the beginning of that day were so lucky.
And I can see the same things happening today.
We still have difficulties with the way the world is working, but I can sit in my backyard and read a book in a glorious and magical space we are able to enjoy anytime we want. I cooked a steak for my kiddos birthday that was the best steak I’ve ever made and he agreed about how great it was (if you knew my kids you’d know what an accomplishment that was lol). I got to play a round of golf in Tahoe all by myself, taking my time, enjoying the course, and just playing without any stress. I came home to a house FULL of lego sets, and had a full on “shit do you see how many lego sets we have here?!” moment where I remembered how lucky I was.
And it doesn’t have to just be about feeling good and positive.
I sit in moments thinking about how I miss our cat that died earlier this year. About how he would have howled at me and ran all over my desk and knocked shit over just to get some pets lol. Or about how my other cat that has cancer isn’t going to be here soon. Or about how in 5 years, my oldest will probably be going to college. Or about how I worry about my kid and how life is treating her while she’s at school (yea she just started school today in the middle of July lol - she goes to a year round school!).
I dwell on projects that I know will fail, or on colleagues that I know are losing their jobs, or on friends who I don’t talk to because I’m too introverted to reach out, and on and on.
And yet, I can step back and say no matter what, I know that future me will be jealous and nostalgic for this time.
Future me is gonna be so happy that this moment happened, because it made him whatever he is. He’s not the same person I am today, he’s the person I am today plus all the experiences that happen between now and then. Good, bad, indifferent, those experiences make us.
And in my head, the act of acknowledging and appreciating those experiences is being present and being thankful.
Not exactly an “engineering” post huh? But it IS all about empathy. Empathy for your future self, your past self, and your present self. All of them are different people, and all of them have different perspectives, but all of them ultimately are you. You get to give them the acknowledgment and appreciation and show up the way you want to show up.
But the only way to do it, is to take some time to think about it and do it. I forced it by forcing myself to read every day and it constantly makes me think about how I have gotten to this moment in life (weird right shouldn’t I be focusing on the book?! I guess my brain can’t handle the one thing at a time lol). Or by taking a walk. Or just sitting outside. Just being.
So amid all the tumult and craziness that is our current reality, try and find some quiet. Try and find some reflection. And thank your past self, appreciate your current self, and do something that would make your future self look back and go “that fucking lucky asshole”.