On Hidden Sources Of Fitness

I was walking home from the supermarket the other day when my wrist started vibrating.

I pulled up my cuff and saw the new fitness tracking wristband I had forgotten I was wearing. 

The screen said “Congratulations, Rudi! You have met your goal!”

“What goal?” I thought. “What is even going on?”

I had purchased this wristband just a day earlier. I thought I’d use it to monitor my heart rate as I began a new exercise routine.

Now that I was wearing this new device, it had started tracking my steps along with my heart rate, and without asking me, it had set a goal of 7500 steps a day. 

My “success” at meeting this goal came as a surprise to me, not only because I hadn’t known about the goal, and hadn’t wanted the device to track my steps in the first place, but because I tend to think of my walk to the supermarket as a “nothing” walk. It’s a purely practical walk I take to get bread and peanut butter. It doesn’t count for anything. 

When I go on a “real” walk, a long walk that extends far outside my neighborhood, this supermarket is the landmark I see on the way back home that tells me I’m almost there. If I only make it to that nearby landmark, and then I go straight back home, I haven’t really gone anywhere, have I?

But according to my fitness tracker, the round trip is a full 7500 steps. 

I have a reputation for underestimating the time it takes to get somewhere on foot. If I say that a place is “right around the corner” it might not be. “We can walk there in five minutes,” means “It’ll take fifteen if we go fast.” I always want to believe it’s possible to walk.

What do I take away from the fitness tracker’s insight that my “nothing” walk is not nothing? 

When I felt that unexpected jubilant buzzing and saw the celebratory text flashing on the device’s miniature screen, it was the first time in my life I had received praise for completing such a routine activity – taking one of my humdrum, practical, boring, “nothing” walks along the busy main streets in my neighborhood with rush-hour traffic underway. It’s fun to be congratulated for a thing that you didn’t even think of as “a thing.” Who or what besides a fitness tracker would ever give me positive feedback on walking to my local Shaw’s and back? Certainly not myself.

And there’s the problem. It’s good that I’m not reluctant to walk to the supermarket. I can get a decent amount of exercise from this errand alone –  two to three miles of walking depending on what route I take – without even thinking about it or planning it.

But the fact that I consider it a “nothing” walk means that when I don’t take it, I might not realize that anything’s missing. Why would it matter if I skip “nothing”? 

There are lots of situations that can prevent me from taking this walk. If the weather is horrible one week, I won’t take the walk. If I get a ride to the supermarket, I won’t take the walk. If I’m really busy and stressed out, maybe I’ll have groceries delivered to my door, and I won’t take the walk. And if don’t take my “nothing” walk for many days in a row, then as for exercise, I might be getting literally nothing.

The bigger lesson I take from all this is that sometimes we’re not aware of the hidden infrastructure in our lives, the hidden sources of fitness or wellness that we rely on without knowing what they are.

I’ve been talking about physical exercise, but socializing is another important part of wellness. When I was working at a startup in the early 2000s, the office moved to a far-away location in the suburbs where I had a two-hour commute by public transportation in the mornings — several subways and a bus. In the evenings, I used to catch a ride home with a co-worker and during that ride home, we’d chat and vent and reminisce and talk about anything and everything.

While I would never choose to have that arduous two-hour commute in the mornings, there was an unanticipated benefit of the office moving far away. It caused me to get rides home with co-workers which meant that every single day, I was getting at least an hour of social time. 

When I started working from home, that daily hour of social time went to zero. A pillar of overall wellbeing was suddenly knocked away, but I didn’t notice it because I never thought about that ride as important except for the practical purpose of getting home. We can lose things that matter to us but if we never thought they mattered, we might struggle to understand why we feel so different when they’re gone.

Back to physical fitness, you know, my living space has two floors. I wasn’t looking for two floors when I chose the place; I would have been perfectly happy with one large floor. But the two-floor situation means there’s a staircase I walk up and down probably twenty times a day. I wonder how much of my fitness depends on that one flight of stairs that I never planned or sought to have?

Comparing Alcohol To What?

Does it make any sense to compare “life with alcohol” to “life without alcohol”?

That’s surely the comparison you’d make if you’re thinking about drinking less or quitting. But is it the right comparison?

Stories abound where someone quits drinking – they try “life without alcohol,” and discover that they feel so much better than they used to feel. Reflecting on the before-and-after, they vow they’ll never add alcohol back into their life. I sometimes wish that were my story.

I’ve subtracted alcohol from my life many times over the years. And I’ve stayed “on the wagon” for months at a time, without much struggle. But I never had that moment of revelation where life seemed so much better than before.

I always saved a lot of money and felt like I had more time, that’s true. I probably slept better. But the difference was never quite the “Aha!” that other people talk about. 

Recently it dawned on me that I’ve been making the wrong comparison. That’s because when I drink, I’m looking for alcohol to assist me in specific ways – to fill certain roles in my life, to perform certain functions or services. When I consider “life minus alcohol,” I’m considering life without all of those needs being filled. I’m taking something away and leaving a hole there, and of course life is not going to feel great with a hole, even when the side-effects and harmful aspects of that missing thing are now gone themselves.

To do the comparison right – to really reevaluate my relationship with alcohol – I’d have to go beyond abstaining. I have to find new ways of filling the roles that alcohol was playing in my life. Once I had replaced alcohol, finding new ways to obtain the same services that alcohol was providing, I could compare this new life with the old drinking life.

If I was thinking about quitting TV, I could throw my TV out the window and see how I felt. But I might not feel great unless I replaced the TV with radio, or replaced the TV with reading, or replaced the TV with going to a live theater performance once a week, or some combination of all three. So to make a decision about keeping TV in my life, I shouldn’t compare “TV” versus “no TV.” I should compare “TV” versus “radio, reading, and live theater instead of TV.” 

What does that mean for alcohol? What are all the things I’d need to do instead of alcohol, to fill the roles it plays? To answer that, I’d first need to understand what those roles are.

So here’s a list of roles that I’d like filled, needs that I’d like satisfied, services that I’d like performed:

• I’d like a way of achieving rapid physical relaxation when I’m feeling tense and tight.
• I’d like a reward I can give myself to celebrate achievements and commemorate special occasions. 
• I’d like a pick-me-up I can use to brighten my mood and create a celebratory feel when everything seems dark and upsetting – a tonic that makes things feel “OK” when they otherwise don’t.
• I’d like a boredom reliever – something I can reliably enjoy doing when I can’t figure out what to do. Something that helps me feel different when I’m tired of feeling the same old way. Something that “shakes things up” and creates a sense of variety when there is none.
• I’d like a harshness reducer – something that helps me ease up when I’m feeling highly critical of myself and others and the situations we find ourselves in.
• I’d like a source of fun destinations to visit, places to spend time where people are relaxed and in a good mood and it’s easy to “chill” and enjoy being there for hours.
• I’d like a location enhancer – something that helps me pass the time in a particular place and feel like I’m having a significant experience there. Something that can convert a drab place into a fun one.
• I’d like a mental relaxant. Something that helps me stop worrying, enjoy the moment, and feel less inhibited. A catalyst for presence and spontaneity. 
• I’d like a social lubricant – something that helps to calm social discomfort, whether it be anxiety, impatience, or frustration.
• I’d like something that facilitates bonding and shared experience.
• I’d like a source of satisfying, anchoring ritual in my life. 
• I’d like a source of compelling sensory experiences, a source of interesting flavors and aromas with nuances that can be compared. If these flavors and aromas are attached to history, geography, and culture, even better.
• I’d like something that gives me a second wind when I’m working on a really difficult project. Something that helps me “get through” and keep going.
• I’d like something that sends me on an experiential journey, where I’m looking forward to how I’m going to feel in the moments ahead.

So what would I need to add to my life to accomplish these same things, to obtain these same services, without using alcohol? It’s fun to answer this question as if the sky were the limit. For example, if I were to seek physical relaxation without ever using alcohol, how would I do it? If there were no financial or time constraints, I’d get a massage every day. I’d hire a personal trainer to help me give my body the level of daily workout that it really needs and wants. Along with my trainer, I’d have a yoga instructor. I’d meditate every day. I’d take two long walks every day. I’d avoid sitting in a chair for more than an hour at a time. I’d do a mountain hike or a forest walk every weekend. I’d make sure to have a regular sleep schedule. Maybe I’d take a dance class.

Is there some reduced form of this that’s actually practical? Yes, but it would take organization, planning, and investment. In many cases I’m looking to alcohol to compensate for a lack of planning. Alcohol makes it easy to get what I want when I want it. It’s the equivalent of ordering physical relaxation or social lubrication or boredom relief on Amazon, at the spur of the moment. Indeed, it resembles Amazon in that it’s effective, convenient, quick-acting, widely available, and socially acceptable. Except alcohol does not present itself as a corporate behemoth – it’s branded as my favorite local up-and-coming independent microbrewery that I’m happy to support. 

The more we order from Amazon, the harder it gets to even know how to find stuff elsewhere. And we don’t feel immediately rewarded when we stop ordering from Amazon. The same goes for drinking. The more we turn to alcohol to “order” the feelings and experiences we want, the less energy we invest in the infrastructure to satisfy our needs in other ways, and the harder it gets to even know how do that. We can quit, but we might not feel immediately rewarded. The reward comes when we replace alcohol with other things. Doing that starts with knowing what we functions we want to replace.

My personal goal in writing this essay is not to quit, but to drink more mindfully, which means drinking less. The idea is to not see “less” as a sacrifice. It’s not about forgoing something I enjoy. It’s about adding “more” of other things I enjoy. To reduce my need for alcohol, what are the rewarding things I already have in my life that I can do more of? What are the new things I can add to my life that I never added before, because alcohol was taking that space?

On Balancing Foresight With Presence

Why is it so hard to stop worrying and smell the roses? Why do we struggle to take the advice of Jesus, who said “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” 

To see why worry is so difficult to escape, we need to examine what makes worry possible in the first place. Worry originates in our ability to imagine the future. The ability to imagine the future is an essential part of who we are as humans – it’s a defining strength, but also a defining vulnerability. 

Why should imagination be considered a strength? How do we benefit from the power to anticipate, fantasize, or mentally explore a situation that might arise sometime later – in an hour, a month, a decade? Of course, we gain the chance to prepare for that situation, and to take actions now that might improve the outcome. When our capacity to envision the future serves as a benefit, we call it “foresight.” 

Popular wisdom is full of praise for the virtue of foresight. “Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.” Those are the words of Sun Tzu. “The future depends on what you do today.” That’s from Gandhi. “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” That’s Malcolm X. “The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time.” That’s William S. Burroughs inadvertently echoing Proverbs 27:12, where it is written, “A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions.” Henry Ford, who knew something about business, said “Patience and foresight are the two most important qualities in business,” and Theodore Roosevelt said that foresight is “the one characteristic more essential than any other” for a growing nation. We’ve all heard that “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” The same idea was put in positive form by Amelia Barr, who said, “Forethought spares afterthought” and by Alexander Graham Bell, who said, “Preparation is the key to success.” 

But the act of imagining the future has a downside too – it’s not always helpful. Our ability to envision “tomorrow” opens the door for tomorrow’s pain to hurt us today. Although we might be insulated from some future hardship by a buffer of time – by the padding of days, months, or years – we can still suffer from that hardship early. Our imagination easily defeats the “insulation” of time, transporting that hardship to the present – and this is true regardless of whether the anticipated hardship is actually going to happen or not. All that matters is that we think it might. The power to imagine the future makes us vulnerable to predictions – some false, others unchangeably true – that consume our attention, distracting us from the demands and opportunities of the present moment. 

The same capacity of seeing ahead – the same talent that allows for planning and preparation – also gets in the way of presence. Our great strength is also our Achilles heel. When this power of seeing ahead backfires on us, causing stress without providing any benefit in exchange, we don’t call it foresight anymore – instead we call it “worry” – that’s the evil twin of foresight – and we wish we could be rid of it. 

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” That quote is often attributed to Mark Twain. “Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.” That’s E. B. White quoting his neighbor. “A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.” That’s Aesop. “Every man’s life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain,” that’s Marcus Aurelius, whose sentiment was echoed centuries later by Mother Teresa: “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today.” Jane Austen, writing in Emma, asks, “Why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!” And we heard from Jesus at the outset of this essay: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34)  

Listening to popular aphorisms, we’re told we should cultivate foresight – always looking ahead to the future – but we should also cultivate presence – casting worry aside and embracing the here and now. But we can’t do both at once. 

As we go through our lives, we are called to switch between two contradictory stances toward the future. On the one hand, we must try to know the future – to look into its face – to reach towards it – to ready ourselves for it. But we must sense when this concern for the future has gone too far, beyond utility, and then we must retreat and stop being so concerned, so curious. We must trade our binoculars for blindfolds. Indeed, we must shield ourselves from the daunting burden of the future, the overwhelming complexity of the future, the blinding flame of the future. At times, we must deliberately ignore that flame – block it out – turn away from it – choose not to think about it or try to see it, so that we can appreciate the present, as if inside the safety of a cocoon. But when that cocoon becomes too restrictive, too limiting, again we must emerge from it and stare at what lies beyond.

How should we find the right balance between these two stances – cultivating foresight – planning, preparing, looking ahead, on the one hand, and on the other hand cultivating presence – embracing the moment, living in the here and now, casting worry aside? How do we balance a concern for what might happen next with a concern for what’s happening now? 

If we could limit our future-imagining to the useful kind – foresight – and eliminate the useless kind – worry – that would be ideal, right? If, whenever we looked ahead, we could practice this anticipation only in a way that led to productive action, that would be good, right? But we’re not ideal beings, and we can’t always estimate what degree of forethought is necessary and what degree is needless before the future actually arrives. How much attention does an upcoming challenge deserve? How closely must we think through an expected situation to be ready for it? It’s all a guess. 

Turning away from the future in favor of the present comes with a paradox too, for it is our awareness of the future – the fact that change is imminent and everything will end – that allows us to appreciate what we have right now. Without keeping the future in mind, we might not experience the present as fully. Indeed, one way of experiencing the present – one way of spending time and connecting with other people – is to work together on planning.

As for cultivating a balance between future-focus and present-focus, most of the time we just wing it, using binoculars sometimes, wearing blindfolds other times, and hoping we’re doing enough of both. But there’s no guarantee that a happy equilibrium will arise. As we muddle through life, it’s common to find that we’re worrying more than we’d like, and yet when we try to heed Jesus’ advice “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow” we find it impossible. We’re not exercising as much foresight as we’d like, nor as much presence; rather we’re worrying too much, then deadening our worries with substances, diversions, and distractions.

Again we might ask, why is worry so hard to overcome? We’ve seen that worry comes from the same place as something good and necessary. If we want to be ready for the future, we have to invoke our capacity to imagine the future, and when we emphasize that capacity, worry is an unavoidable byproduct. If we’re thinking a lot about tomorrow, which we might need to do, sometimes we can’t help but “borrow trouble from tomorrow.”

But a deeper reason why worry is so hard to overcome is that when we disengage from imagining the future – when we aim for presence instead of foresight – we have to work against the training, the feedback, the reinforcement that we’ve been receiving throughout our entire lives.

We might suppose that foresight and presence are equally important – two necessary stances that any person must know how to assume – but our society is obsessed with foresight, not with presence. There’s an imbalance in the feedback that comes our way when we exhibit these differing qualities. Foresight gets the feedback – it wins praise and recognition, while presence is invisible and unnoticed. 

A civilization that brought the specter of nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change upon itself might not seem like a civilization that is obsessed with foresight. Indeed if we’re taking a macroscopic perspective, we might say that an insane disregard for the future is the defining quality of our civilization. But just because we are building weapons that could destroy life on our planet and pumping carbon into the atmosphere in a way that’s upending the delicate balance we require for survival, we can still be obsessed with foresight on a microscopic level. We still revere the ability to see a few steps ahead in our everyday affairs. We still value foresight in daily life more than we value the ability to shield ourselves from what lies ahead so that we can fully inhabit the here and now.

Think about it: “She’s always prepared” is one of the biggest compliments that could be made about someone in a professional capacity. The debater who comes ready with a response to any argument is the one who wins. The salesperson who anticipates our questions is the one we buy from. To get a job as a columnist you have to show that you know more about the future than the average person. To be a successful business leader you have to foresee what your competitors might do and what your customers might want. To be a successful venture capitalist you have to foresee what markets might emerge and what businesses might succeed. To be a respected real-estate agent you have to know which neighborhoods and which properties will turn out to be good investments. To be respected as a physician you have to be able to foresee the health consequences of taking this medication or eating this diet or receiving this therapy as opposed to that other one. To be a good quarterback you have to anticipate the other team’s strategy. To be a good goalie you have to predict where the ball or the puck is going to go. To be a warrior you have to foresee the enemy’s next move. To set up shop as a psychic, you need to convince clients that you are gifted with a clairvoyance that they do not possess. To succeed as a professional chef, you need to master “mise en place” – the methodical preparation of ingredients prior to cooking, and the ability to foresee how a certain combination of ingredients is going to work out. To have a comfortable retirement, you need to save money decades in advance. To have a productive day, you need to put your tasks on the calendar, to know what you’re going to do and when.

Everywhere, we hear the message, and experience the reality that planning and preparation are the way to get a leg up. Being ready for opportunities is the key to getting ahead. Foresight is the way to stand out. Future-mindedness is the path to being successful and distinguished. In Proverbs 21:5 we hear “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” 

Because foresight is so practically valuable, it is also a way of gaining attention and prestige. If you say “Listen to me!” and a crowd asks “Why?” your answer might be some form of “Because I know what’s going to happen next!” To be able to see a few steps further into the future than the people around you makes you “smart” or “well-informed” or “in-the-know” or “someone to listen to” or “a prophet.” We compete for attention by trying to convince each other that we’re the best fortune-teller of the lot – we’re the one who can be trusted to foresee how events will unfold. Foresight is so precious, practically and socially, that we covet it, we grasp for it, we become attached to possessing it, accumulating it, hoarding it, and showing it off.

What happens when we lack foresight – when we don’t sufficiently think ahead – when we don’t spend enough time visualizing the future and trying to know it and be ready for it? What kind of external feedback then comes our way?

If we’re late for a business meeting because we didn’t plan for traffic, we might be called “unreliable,” or “undependable,” or “disorganized.” If we don’t know how to answer a question on a test because we didn’t study enough in advance, we lose points and give up our chance to be at the top of the class. If we didn’t bring a raincoat because we weren’t thinking it could rain, we get soaked. If we drink too much because we weren’t thinking about how we’d feel for the next day, we suffer a hangover. If we smoke, overeat, and fail to exercise because we’re not planning ahead for our health, then someday we get bad news from the doctor. If we write software without anticipating edge cases and exceptions that could arise, our system might crash in production. If we spend more money than we should because we’re not anticipating our upcoming bills, we might go bankrupt. If we launch a business project that falls behind schedule and goes over budget, we won’t get a promotion.

When we fail to look ahead, we’re known as “shortsighted,” or “myopic,” or simply “dumb.” If we often try to look ahead but we’re not good at it, if we’re not adept at prediction, if we’re not accurate with our projections, we become known as unreliable, untrustworthy: “He’s always off the mark.” If we’re always getting the future wrong, we lose our claim to other people’s attention. They feel free to ignore us because our assertions are of no consequence. We open ourselves to ridicule, as Jesus observed in Luke 14:28: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’” 

What’s the flipside of all this? When do we ever receive positive feedback for deliberately not thinking ahead? When does praise ever come our way for choosing presence over future-mindedness? When do we ever refrain from planning and get told we did the right thing? When do we ever eschew worry and get told that we’ve made the best decision? If we follow the advice, “Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you,” when would anyone notice and salute us for it? When are we ever considered wise for not making predictions? When does anyone admire us for the skill of wearing blindfolds to shield ourselves from the distracting glare of the future? When is it acknowledged as good and worthwhile to treat time as a buffer that insulates us from the future? When is it ever considered virtuous to say, “I don’t have to worry about it yet, so I won’t”?

Would a companion ever say “I really appreciate how present you were able to be in our walk along the beach because you weren’t thinking about sea-level rise, coastal flooding, and the existential threat of climate change at that moment”? Would a friend ever tell you, “I know you have a root canal coming up next week but congratulations on not being preoccupied with future dental work right now so we can enjoy these cheeseburgers together.”

When we choose not to worry about the future, not to look ahead, not to predict what’s going to happen next – and when we do this for a good reason: so that we can fully participate in the here and now – this is often an invisible choice, a hidden choice that affects our inner experience alone. Perhaps no one knows what we’re choosing to not think about. No one knows of all the worries that we’ve successfully put out of our mind. 

There are planning awards. There are no “presence” awards. We can win acclaim for showing that we’re good at predicting the future. But when would we ever be praised for intentionally disengaging from the future, calming down, relaxing, stretching, taking a deep breath, smelling the roses? That’s just good for us if we can squeeze it in. Our high school yearbook is probably the last time we’ve seen any of our peers celebrated in print as “most laid back” or “most chill,” or “most in-the-moment.”

When we fail to plan, when we show up late and unprepared, there’s lots of negative feedback that comes our way, and rightly so. But what negative feedback do we receive for failing to embrace the moment, failing to manifest presence? “Relax, calm down, you’re worrying too much!” Quite likely, we’ve received feedback like that during our more stressful moments. But no one can really demand that we relax, they can only suggest it. No one can require that we appreciate the present moment, in the same way they can complain when we’re unprepared and they can demand that we think further ahead.

And when someone is overprepared, when someone takes too many precautions, when someone studies too hard for a test or practices too hard for a tennis game or buys more travel insurance than they really need or packs too many supplies in their suitcase, we can smile at it, we can suggest that they chill out, but in the end, we let it go, give it a pass. While bad planning on a friend’s or coworker’s part might harm us too, and it might be a valid reason for us to complain, the same is less often true with overpreparation, which is more likely harmless, perhaps even helpful. If someone chooses to overprepare, well, that’s their prerogative.  

Where does this leave us? We know that two things are true. Foresight is good, and presence is good. It’s good to think ahead, and it’s good to embrace the here and now. But there’s an imbalance in the kind of feedback that comes our way from taking these two attitudes. One attitude is constantly being reinforced and the other is often being ignored, going unnoticed because it is an internal choice, whose benefits are known to us alone. Success in life is supposed to come from constantly thinking ahead, whereas the happiness we find from being “present” is evident only to us and it’s the result of an inner decision that’s invisible to others.

It’s as if we’re all telling each other, all the time: “Predict! Plan! Prepare! Can’t you see what’s going to happen if you do that? Why didn’t you plan for this? Didn’t you know you’d be in this situation? What are you doing to get ready? Predict! See ahead! Think further into the future! Get ready! Aren’t you glad you planned for this? Now plan some more!”

What this means is that when we want to be present, when we want to temporarily disengage from looking ahead, we have to work against a deeply ingrained habit, a pattern of future-oriented thinking that is constantly being reinforced and rewarded. If something’s wrong with our lives, surely it’s a result of not planning. Surely we can fix it by being more disciplined and strategic. Surely we need more foresight, not less. “Do your planning and prepare your fields before building your house.” (Proverbs 24:27) 

Of course, we can escape our bias toward future-mindedness. We can find presence in any activity that engages us fully – playing a sport, watching a movie, having sex, working through a math problem. We can find presence in meditation. We can go on vacation. And we can deaden our future-anxiety by drinking, taking drugs, seeking thrills, or losing ourselves in work.

But what happens when we try to cultivate presence without a structured activity or context that makes it OK? What happens when we’re feeling anxious about the future, and we’d like to stop worrying, but we’d prefer to do this cleanly and simply, without substituting a distraction in place of our worry?

That’s where we run into trouble, because we’re going against a lifetime of training, perhaps a lifetime of feeling guilty about all those times when we weren’t sufficiently prepared, when we didn’t think far enough ahead, when we suffered from a lack of foresight, when we concluded that more preparation – not less – is what would make things better next time.  That’s where it’s easy to think we don’t have the “right” or the license to relax until we’ve figured things out and gotten all our affairs in order, which is going to be never. That’s where we might grapple with the stigma that people who “aren’t thinking about the future” are the ones who are doing irresponsible things like taking dangerous drugs or polluting or racking up debt on their credit cards that they can’t repay, and we don’t want to be one of those negligent people. That’s where we might grapple with the awareness that humanity has brought disaster on itself by not caring for its future, not planning for sustainability, not taking action to reduce carbon emissions when the first warnings were sounded, and that what we need as a species is more future-mindedness, not less. “A stitch in time saves nine.”

To really relax, smell the roses, and be present requires more than a positive step of embracing the sensations and nuances of our current experience. It’s also requires negative step, a willingness to not do certain things we’re conditioned to always do, certain things we believe we need to do more of. 

To really embrace an attitude of presence, we might need to get comfortable with statements like these:

• I am not aiming to know how things will turn out
• I’m not trying to predict, anticipate, or plan anything right now
• I’m not thinking about what might happen in one hour or one year
• I am not aiming to influence or change any future event
• I am not thinking about how to avoid any future difficulty or solve any upcoming problem
• I am not trying to decide in advance how I will make any upcoming choice
• I am not sketching out what I am going to do tomorrow or later in my life
• I am not looking for ideas or suggestions on how to make the rest of my day better
• I am not trying to visualize how anything plays out
• I am not looking to grow or be better right now
• I am not looking to improve my readiness for anything that’s coming up
• I am not steeling myself for any future hardship
• I am not searching for insight on any situation that will help me guess its outcome
• I am not trying to improve, fix, or solve anything right now
• I am not regretting any past failure to plan or prepare, right now
• I am not thinking about ways to improve the direction of my life, my community, or society at large right now

When do we give ourselves permission to take this attitude without feeling it’s shortsighted and wrong? When do we acknowledge that ignoring the future temporarily is useful for our health and mental wellbeing? If we meditate, perhaps that’s our time. If we drink, maybe that’s our time, when we’re pouring a glass of beer. If we take long walks on the beach, maybe that’s our time, when we’re feeling the wet sand on our feet and listening to the waves crash. But are we able to take this attitude without a situational aid or crutch that makes it OK? Are we able to do it simply because we realize we’re worrying too much and we’d like to find a few moments of relief?

Perhaps what is missing from our mental arsenal is the idea of “ignoring the future” as a deliberate, respectable technique that we should employ – from time to time – in the interest of health and productivity. Perhaps what’s missing is the idea of “wearing blindfolds” as a useful and valuable behavior, not always a sign of ignorance, laziness, or immaturity. Perhaps what’s missing is the idea that when someone says “I don’t have to worry about it yet, so I’m going to ignore it” they are not necessarily procrastinating or living in denial – they might be practicing a healthy and effective coping strategy. The fact that this strategy can be overused and misused doesn’t mean it’s always being used in a detrimental way. Maybe it deserves a bit more respect. Perhaps the ability to block out the future has just as much value as the ability to foresee the future, and we should in fact cultivate both abilities.

If we accept that our capacity to imagine the future is powerful, and that this power has a consequence – it allows the pain of the future to affect us in the present – then we should also accept that we’d need some shielding from the future’s influence on us. We should accept that we’d need tools to help us disentangle ourselves from the phenomenon of worry. Tools to shield ourselves from the projectiles of the future flying through the open window of our imagination, like space junk.

We wear sweaters to insulate ourselves from cold weather. We wear sunglasses to shield our eyes on a bright day. We depend on roofs to keep the rain from hitting us. These are prudent things to do, as long as we don’t wear the same sweater all year or never take our sunglasses off or refuse to go outdoors. So why can’t it also be prudent and wise to use tools – mental tools – to shelter ourselves from the future, as long as we’re not seeking that shelter all the time? The important point is that this shelter, this insulation, this barrier is not permanent. It’s temporary, used in pursuit of calm, rest, refreshment, just like we sleep at night, then wake up and go about the day.

Planning for our own health and wellbeing is perhaps the most important kind of planning we can do. But to be well, to keep ourselves from growing sick with worry, we need to know how to retreat from a future-oriented mindset, to relinquish our obsession with trying to know or see what happens next, to cultivate presence with the same dedication as we cultivate foresight. To prepare for the future, we need to get good at taking breaks from preparing.

On Being Reckless To Escape Fear

When we can achieve calm simply by doing calming things, we’re lucky. If we’re frazzled and tense but we find it possible to regain our peace of mind by taking a deep breath or laughing at a joke or going out for a long walk, then hallelujah. But when it’s more than generalized stress that we’re up against, when it’s specifically fear that disturbs our tranquility – the gnawing menace of fear – we might have to apply more than a gentle, calming technique to find relief. We might have to do something counterintuitive.

Fear is not all bad. It has a bad name, but it also has a purpose. When Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” echoing sentiments expressed by Montaigne, Bacon, and Thoreau, he neglected to mention that we should also fear the complete absence of fear, shouldn’t we?

If we were strolling along the double yellow line of an empty rural highway when a car appeared out of nowhere, rushing towards us with now just ten seconds till impact, then fear would come to the rescue. Fear would make us bolt to the side of the road. Fear – the anticipation of future pain, an anticipation that is itself painful to experience in the present – would be our savior.

But what if a friend were standing beside us, a daredevil who yanked us back to the center of the road and said, “Let’s run toward the car and see what happens.” 

“That’s crazy!” we might shout. “What if the car can’t slow down? What if it hits us? What if it swerves and crashes?” The idea of ignoring our fear would cause more fear.

If fear can be said to have a “design,” then it is designed so we can’t easily control it, can’t effortlessly escape it. The attempt to do so only makes it more intense. Fear is sticky, it’s entrapping, it’s self-magnifying, it commandeers our attention absolutely, so that it can guide us to safety in those circumstances when ignoring a threat for even one second would be perilous. To be of any help to us, fear must have the “authority” in our mind to prevail over distractions and bad influences like our madcap friend.

In dangerous situations, we benefit from the involuntary nature of fear – from the way it’s not optional, not easy to subdue. If we had enough control over our fear that we could calmly disengage from it at our friend’s suggestion and join them in pursuing whatever thrill is to be found in a game of chicken with a Corvette doing eighty miles per hour, that would be a harmful and potentially fatal kind of control to possess.

But the problem with fear is that it feels the same to us, and is similarly commandeering, whether it is rational or not, whether it is well-founded or not, whether it is useful or not. Fear brings the same racing heart, the same goose bumps, the same queasy feeling, the same sweat, the same tension in the neck, and the same psychic fixation, whether we’re afraid of a real sports car rushing toward us, or afraid of imaginary monsters in the bedroom closet. Fear even feels the same, and exerts the same control over our attention, when we’re 99.999% sure that the threat isn’t real and we’re telling ourselves that we have no good reason to be afraid. 

If we were secretly terrified of monsters, we could open the closet, shine a flashlight all around, and notice the complete absence of monsters. But we might also discover that fear doesn’t respond to refutation. True, there are no monsters to be seen right now, and everyone says that monsters don’t exist at all – it’s “childish” to believe in them. But fear can always keep itself alive by peppering us with questions: What if the monsters were hiding when we looked? What if they left the closet to wait somewhere else and they’re planning to return with a vengeance? Even if there’s only a 0.001% chance that monsters exist, we know that improbable things sometimes turn out to be true, and this particular improbable thing would be really, really bad.

As much as fear can save our life in the face of genuine threats, it can also steal our life-energy in the face of bogus ones. The fear we feel regarding monsters can consume our waking attention and disturb our precious sleep with no payback, no reward. When it’s monsters or another imaginary hazard that’s causing our fear, the ability to control that fear would be a blessing that could help us conserve our peace and vitality. As much as we don’t want the option of ignoring our fear when that fear arises because of a real emergency like an onrushing car, we’d benefit from that same capacity to ignore our fear, to subdue it, to escape it when our fear arises because of a false, but still draining idea like a giant three-horned bear-demon that’s supposedly lurking among the trousers and pressed shirts.

An analogy to pain is informative here. It’s good that we feel pain. Those rare people who possess a congenital insensitivity to pain don’t live very long: they might calmly bite off their tongue, or break a bone in good cheer, or suffer a burn that doesn’t hurt although it is still bad for them. But those of us who do feel pain often feel more than we’d like, more than we can benefit from. A common headache might alert us to an issue that needs medical attention but more likely the pain is useless as an indicator of anything significant: it drains our energy and keeps us from concentrating and causes endless annoyance without providing any benefit whatsoever. And that’s why there are fortunes to be made in producing substances that deaden pain. As essential as pain is to life, the appeal of painkillers is so great that countless lives have been upended or lost to the addiction that the strongest painkillers create. And if there’s one substance we might expect to receive at the very end of our lives, it might be morphine.

Like physical pain, fear is helpful and harmful, useful and unnecessary. The question is: how can we exert greater control over our fear in those specific situations where we’re absolutely sure that our fear is harmful and unnecessary, and yet we still feel it?

To exert greater control over our fear, we need to look closer at its structure. Fear often has three components. First, there’s the awareness of a possible threat. Second, there’s the expectation of pain or suffering that could come from ignoring the threat. Third, there’s a forecast about how we’d feel about ourselves if we ignored the threat: what would ignoring this threat say about our character, and what would it mean regarding our culpability in any ensuing disaster? For example, if I’m feeling afraid of monsters, then I’m thinking first, that monsters are dangerous; second, that if I ignore monsters, I could suffer; and third, that if I get hurt by monsters because I ignored them, I’d have been foolish, reckless, stupid to turn my attention away, and I’d be culpable for my suffering.

From that third point, we can see that what locks us into our fear is our desire to be responsible, to be conscientious, to be attentive to threats, to do what is right and necessary to avoid those threats or at least not to let them take us by surprise. These thoughts are the infrastructure that keeps our fear in place. We’d like to subdue or overcome our fear, but we remain fearful because we’re committed to avoiding rashness, gullibility, recklessness, insanity. We might try to be brave and ignore the monsters, we might repeat the assertion that they don’t exist, we might try to “play chicken” with the threat, but still we think, “This is not a game! I’m going to get hurt if I ignore this danger. Something bad is going to happen, and I’ll be at fault if I don’t stay vigilant.”

I have an example from my own life: I’ll get ready to leave my house, sometimes – my shoelaces are tied, my jacket is on, and I’m almost out the front door, but then I remember I should check the stove. So I go back inside, hurrying to the kitchen. At this point, my fear of a gas leak is rational, because I have left a burner on before – just once or twice in twenty years – but it’s better to be safe.

But once in a while, I’ll finish checking the stove, make my way back out the door, step onto the sidewalk, and then wonder if I overlooked something. Can I remember how the stove appeared with all the knobs in the off position? Although I was just back in the kitchen looking at those knobs, I can’t clearly recall what I saw because I had been rushing, I had been distracted. Is it possible that I had been so absentminded in my checking that I might have missed a knob that was slightly ajar? A gas leak could be really bad, so maybe I should go back to check a second time and put the fear out of my mind? 

At this point, my fear has crossed a line into the realm of the irrational, the unhelpful, the obsessive, and I know that. What are the chances that I would go all the way back to the kitchen to check the stove and not notice an evident problem? But the fear feels the same as it did the first time. Even if there’s only the faintest, most miniscule chance that a burner is on and I didn’t notice it, I can imagine that possibility quite vividly, and I really don’t want my house to catch on fire. If I ignore my fear and give up my opportunity to prevent a disaster, and if that disaster does come to pass, I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.

So what’s keeping me bound to my fear in this situation? It’s an errant commitment to responsibility, prudence, and caution. It’s a desire to avoid foolishness, gone awry. It’s a secondary fear of regret, echoing through my mind in such an annoying way that I’ll do anything to put an end to it: what’s the harm of taking this small extra precaution to put myself at ease? 

Well, the harm of catering to any irrational fear is that we might become dependent on redundant reassurances that serve no purpose and thereby set us up for more fear when we don’t receive them. So how can a person escape from an irrational fear that persists even when they know it is irrational? One strategy is to try to dismantle the infrastructure that keeps our attention bound to the threat in the first place. If it feels reckless or crazy to ignore a nagging possibility of disaster, then we can try to give ourselves permission to feel reckless and crazy. We can try to become more comfortable with that feeling of carelessness, irresponsibility, and foolishness. If we think that disengaging from our fear would make us culpable for a bad outcome, then we can declare that we’re not in charge any more: we’ve already done what we can for caution’s sake, and now the outcome is up to fate.

In my case this would mean that if I feel I’m being negligent by not checking the stove a second time, I should not interpret this feeling as a signal that urges me to go back inside. I should instead take it as a reminder to leave my house and go forward with my day. If I feel I’m making a risky, imprudent choice, I should treat this feeling as a good thing, because it means I’m confronting a fear that’s not serving me.

The idea is to treat the feeling of “I’m being reckless” not as a red light, but as a green one; not as a warning, but as a positive signal. But recklessness is the quality that makes people gamble and have unprotected sex with strangers and play Russian roulette. Recklessness could give you a bankruptcy, an STD, and a bullet in your head. How can recklessness be a virtue?

Of course it’s a question of context. The idea is to cultivate a tolerance for the feeling of recklessness, and to apply this tolerance in a deliberate way, when we’ve surveyed the situation and concluded that we’re not under any grave threat, but we’re still afraid. Now the question is how can we channel our reckless side within that specific context, as a way of loosening fear’s grip.

It’s informative to think of times in our lives when recklessness or rule-breaking or a bit of irresponsibility led to a positive outcome. What is something irresponsible we might have done when the stakes were low and we didn’t suffer, or cause, any harm?

Maybe we stayed up past our bedtime. Maybe we had another drink. Maybe we flirted with someone who was “off limits.” Maybe we spoke up or talked back in a situation where decorum was called for, risking confrontation. Recklessness might have given us a good experience, or helped us meet the love of our life, or allowed us to overcome a barrier in communication. In retrospect, our recklessness seems justified, but at the time, before the positive outcome was known, our behavior felt wrong, dangerous, risky in the truest sense.

When we behave recklessly, it’s often because we want to gain some reward in the moment – excitement, attention, pleasure – more than we care about following rules. But if we’re being reckless as a way of escaping fear – if our way of being “irresponsible” is simply to turn our focus away from a perceived threat and allow ourselves to think of other things – what are we hoping to gain? In this case, we’re being reckless not for pleasure, but for peace; not for excitement, but for calm; not for novelty, but for serenity.

To use recklessness as an antidote to fear we should be clear about what we want, and how much we value it. Inner peace should be something we prize so much that we’re willing to feel reckless and irresponsible to get it. Calm should be important enough to us that we’d take an attitude that feels “insane” or “crazy” in order to find it.

When relaxing actions, like taking a deep breath or going for a walk or attempting some positive self-talk aren’t enough to assuage a nagging fear, we might need to take more aggressive steps, like breaking rules, to get the calm we want. But we needn’t break any public rules or laws. We simply need to break the mental “rules” that tell us where we should place our attention. We simply need to break our inner “laws,” the laws that fear creates within us, the laws that force us to stay focused on a perceived threat. And to really do this, to really pull our attention away from what we fear, we need to get comfortable with the reckless feeling that freedom brings.

The Value Of Mode Awareness

When I think of the people I know who are great public speakers, one person comes to mind. I’ll call him Clark. He’s the best of the best. He can have an audience laughing and curious with his first remark. He’s conversational. He asks questions. Tells stories. Gives strong examples. Keeps things simple and clear, but throws in a twist to keep everyone tuned in. His pacing is perfect. You can always feel his passion.

Those are all the great attributes you can expect in a presentation by Clark, unless it happens to be one of those presentations when he speaks in a rushed monotone throughout, as if he were reading – adding more and more information and not taking a break till the audience is already overwhelmed. When he makes an important point, it falls flat because it’s crowded out by lots of detail that no one cares about.

After Clark gives a talk of that second kind — let’s call it the “bad” kind — he often senses that it didn’t go as well as it could have, and he’ll ask me: “How can I do better, how can I be a better speaker?”

But I tell him: “You don’t need to take a class in public speaking, you could be teaching it. You don’t need to learn how to engage an audience and convey a message – you’re amazing at that.”

My feedback for Clark is that he’s got two totally different speaking “modes” or styles. How could he improve as a speaker? He could improve by learning to recognize which mode he’s in at any time. He could improve by developing “mode awareness.” 

In Clark’s case, there’s Mode 1, which is “Conversational, fun, clear,” and there’s Mode 2, which is “Rushed, monotonous, unfocused.” But when Clark is in Mode 2, he doesn’t always know it. He’d be unstoppable if he developed the “superpower” of noticing when he’s in Mode 2, and then being able to course-correct and switch to Mode 1.

Mode-switching is easier said than done. There are reasons why Clark goes into Mode 1 or Mode 2 and those situational factors might not be simple to overcome. If Clark is happy about being asked to speak, if he believes he can have a positive impact by doing so, if he feels well-prepared, if the schedule gives him enough time to tell jokes and go at a leisurely pace, and if he senses a rapport with the audience, I bet this is what pushes him into Mode 1. But if he was asked to talk at the last minute, if he feels stressed by other competing obligations, if he feels a duty to convey more information than the schedule gives him time for, if he thinks he hasn’t prepared well enough, and if he doesn’t feel the audience is following him, I bet this pushes him into Mode 2.

So the question for Clark is, can he still adopt Mode 1 behaviors when the situation would otherwise send him into Mode 2?

But this isn’t an essay about public speaking per se. This is an essay about what we can all learn from Clark’s combination of excellence and occasional awkwardness.

One thing Clark’s situation shows is that when we’re looking to get better at something, we might already have the skills we’re hoping to gain, we’re just not applying them when we could. When one of Clark’s talks doesn’t go well, it’s not because he’s lacking skill, it’s because he’s not applying the abundant skills that make most of his talks so successful. 

Another thing Clark’s experience shows is that when we’re performing poorly, the “fix” might not be to keep doing the same things that we’re currently doing, but just do them a little better. The fix might be to do different things entirely.

When Clark is in Mode 1, he’s using certain techniques — like telling stories and jokes and asking questions of the audience — that he’s not using at all in Mode 2, when he’s rushing through a whole bunch of verbiage. And when he’s in Mode 2, if he’s speaking in a hurried monotone, well, you don’t fix that by incrementally adding more variation to your tone and gradually inserting more pauses, while saying the same phrases. You fix that by taking a different attitude altogether and letting that new attitude play out in your delivery, which might involve different phrasings altogether, in a totally different tone.

It’s true, situations exist where the difference between having a “bad day” and having a “good day” is all about one specific thing and how we’ll we’re doing that one thing. If we’re competing in a sprint, the difference between a bad day and a good day is how fast we’re able to run. If we could just run a little faster, if we could just shave a second or two off of our time, that would turn a bad day into a good day. But when Clark is speaking in Mode 2, there’s no equivalent of “running faster” that would result in a better talk.

A sprint’s demands are clear, but lots of performance situations are more complex and ambiguous – they require a much more varied range of skills and behaviors than simply running fast. Oftentimes when we’re having a bad day at something complex like public speaking or playing music or even pursuing romance, we’re doing totally different things from what we’d be doing if it were a good day. 

So the lesson is, if we want to have more good days, we shouldn’t try to keep doing the same things we’re doing on bad days, just a little bit better, a little faster, a little cleaner. We’ve got to be open to doing different things altogether. And here’s the kicker — we might already know full well how to do those different things, because we’ve done them many times before, on our good days.