Are You “Planning Ahead” Or Lost In The Future?
Dropping the mental load of constantly trying to live 10 steps ahead
Hello, my friends,
How are you faring these days? Sending you all a warm hug or a high five (whichever you need most today!) and also extending a warm welcome to all new subscribers! If you want to find out more about me and what we do here at Living the In-Between Times on the regular, you can read more here.
This month, we’re doing something a little different. It’s a Wonder Club, which is like a book club, but more interesting. We’re discussing the big questions raised by Oliver Burkeman’s Meditation for Mortals, puzzling out what the book’s ideas mean for real-life people (aka moms trying to make it through the afterschool taxi routine).
Burkeman opens Day 7 of his book with this quote. I nodded along; I feel this anxiety in my bones too many days. And my Wonder is:
What would it mean to drop the mental load of trying to always live in “the next day”? What would it mean to stop “giving my strength” to constantly trying to see around corners, straining to control what might be coming ten steps ahead?
My bestie in NYC texted me about the fires in L.A. last week. “Are you feeling glad to be living in Northern California?” My reply was bleak. “Everyone here is giving each other the look that says, ‘We’re next.’”
I live in a county full of hillsides and open space. The local fire department regularly comes through each neighborhood with citations and recommendations to decrease fire risk. Fire-awareness is part and parcel of home ownership here.
“It doesn’t feel like so much of an ‘if’ as a ‘when’,” I remarked to a landscaper friend, who nodded.
So I thought I was looking “reality” in the face as I sat at the dining room table last week, scrolling story after story of folks who survived, thinking, I’ve really got to make a plan.
My brain rattled on. I’ve thought about this before, but I’ve never actually followed through. Putting a bunch of stuff in bags right now for some future that may never come feels incredibly overwhelming. How would I even think of everything? Plus, everything expires and will need to be changed out every year, and I’ll probably forget or procrastinate on replacing things, so my preparedness won’t end up being enough to make a real difference. But I should really do something…
As so often happens, what had initially started out as a useful intention—I should make a plan—had immediately, unconsciously, set me adrift into the future. And not just any future. A future in which I was somehow simultaneously “too overwhelmed to prepare,” while also fully able to prepare but “doing it wrong.”
It is so easy for human brains to get lost in the future. To think we are somehow performing some important, protective task by running through imagined timelines, ruminating on outcomes we’ll never control.
We tread and retread the loops in our heads without taking action, secretly hoping that all this thinking and problematizing might somehow safeguard us from future negative feelings like discomfort, disappointment, grief. But, the devastating truth is— there isn’t a plan one could ever make that would stretch all the way across the pain of having one’s daily sense of comfort and haven snatched away in an instant.
My feeble ruminations weren’t moving me toward a plan, they were keeping me stuck in an impossible standard of preparedness—imagining I could perfectly provide every item of safety and comfort my family could possibly desire, so as to potentially avoid all pain and inconvenience forevermore!
But, alas, as Burkeman’s book reminds us, total control is an illusion, and chasing after it, perpetual suffering.
I can’t say whether it’s that reading Meditation for Mortals has made me more sensitive to moments of delusional fantasy, or if it was a sense of urgency to take action precipitated by scrolling image after image of devastation, but in that moment, I caught myself spinning.
Like a hiker lost in the woods, the only hope of survival was stopping to take stock. I changed course, abandoning the trepidatious swirl of all I couldn’t control for some comfort and confidence in what I could—recalling my own resilience, my considerable capacity to handle challenge.
I brought the goal in closer, asking myself, “What’s something easy I can do right now, sitting on my couch, to be ready for an evacuation order?” I opened my notes app and jotted down 15 items I’d want to gather. I put a date on the calendar to review the list with my family and see if they wanted to add anything.
I felt something heavy begin to lift.
It’s far from an exhaustive list or a fail-proof plan. But I’m learning that leaning into uncertainty can bring its own kind of contentment.
It sharpens my commitment to not letting an uncontrollable future rob me of the one thing I can control—uncovering the joy, wonder and presence here to be enjoyed in this precious, fleeting in-between time.
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Do you get “lost in the future”? How do you balance planning with ruminating over events outside your control?
Any other Wonders you’re wrestling with from reading the first half of MFM?