What is always coming but never arrives?

Tomorrow.

One thing that held me back from making my switch from PR to academia was tomorrow.

I worried about making more so I could do the things I wanted for my family and myself.  There was always more freedom, more excitement, more security tomorrow.

So, when I started thinking about whether I should radically change my life, I couldn’t get past tomorrow.

What would I do?  How would I take care of my family? What if I fail? What would people say?

I found help in Stoics, those Greek and Roman philosophers who were focused on how to live life in tune with the balance of nature. Not trees and birds, but nature as the proper (natural) function of a thing. Living according to nature is their definition of what is good. People should pursue it.

For the Stoics, reliving what happened yesterday or contemplating what might happen tomorrow  takes a person away from the present moment. And the present is all that matters to a Stoic.

Life is brutally short. It makes no difference if you live 50 years more or 50 seconds. The same outcome awaits us all. However many years we have on this rock amounts to but another brief instance in the totality of the universe. You will tie yourself in knots worrying about the tomorrows that are to come. Your only chance of slowing this inevitable march to oblivion is staying in the present moment.

Stoics are blunt like that, but they are also pragmatists.

They taught people should expend energy and effort only on the things they control.  You control what you are doing at this very moment, how you act, how you treat others. All you have is this moment, nothing more. Yesterday is now a story you can tell. Tomorrow is an infinity of possibilities. Only right now is real. Maximize your effort in this very instant and then do it again in the next instant. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

I think of this approach as “getting small”.

There was a time in college when I was in a bad place. Life was not going how thought it should. My refuge from this was to bury my head in my studies.  Feeling bad? Go study. Pissed off? Hit the books. This is what I mean by “getting small”. I reined in my world to what was happening right now, and the things I could do about it. I didn’t have any money. No car. No girlfriend. What I could do, though, was study.  This is what the Stoics are getting at.

Which takes me back to what I wrote about in last week’s newsletter – learning how to say “No”. To make a change, we need to stop ruminating about the stories of the past and fretting about the endless “what ifs” to come. We have to say “No” to those pointless activities. The Stoics referred to this as avoiding unnecessary things…and thoughts. (Believe me, this is a never-ending process filled with many starts and stops. Fortunately, those failures only last an instant.)

Focus on this very moment. Make small changes because that’s all you have time for in this instant. It might be impossible to see, but those small changes — victories, really — add up.

That time in college that was so full of turmoil also ended up being the period in my young life when I reinvented myself from a barely average student to an excellent one. Now it is a story.

Get small. Focus on right now. Make better decisions in this instant. Leave tomorrow to tomorrow. Before you know it, you will be telling the story about how you reinvented yourself.