Anyone who's met me IRL (as the kids say, or used to say, who can keep up? Anyway, it means In Real Life rather than online) will know that if I look at my feet most days, what I'll see is something pink and sparkly like the shoe pictured above. I'm a big fan of the smiles evoked from me and others by pink, sparkly shoes, so I've been sporting them almost every day for years.
But in this post, I don't want to talk about what's on my feet but what's under them. Look at your feet to see where they are. Wherever you see, that's right where they and you need to be right now. In fact, you can't be anywhere else, so you might as well embrace the here, the now.
I believe a lot of us, myself included, spend a lot of time thinking about what's coming up, what's on the to-do list, what's the next hurdle. Alternately, many of us get stuck in a thinking loop about what has already passed, what if we had said or done something else, something better.
Today, instead of pondering where you've been and where you're going, I encourage you to think about right where you are. Wherever your feet are, that's this moment's challenges and this moment's rewards. Why not stand (or sit) in the present and enjoy it for everything it offers you? You could do the old sensory countdown:
- 5 things you see
- 4 things you hear
- 3 things you feel
- 2 things you smell
- 1 thing you taste
Or take stock of where you are in any other way, as long as you enjoy it. If you have to be where your feet are, why not make the most of it? (And in case you'd enjoy the here and now more with pink/sparkly shoes, I've made the photo above a link to buy them on the Dansko website -- I'd love to have more shoe buddies!)
Please share your responses in the comments.
Funny, I was just making this same point to someone but about space, not time. She was sad she missed an event even though she had a good time at the one she went to instead. I said she hadn’t “missed” the other event any more than she’d missed Carnevale in Rio or a fashion show in Paris or whatever else was happening all over the world at that exact moment. You just are where you are, and sometimes you need to let go of where you are not.
(It doesn’t come easily to me either. I’m jealously looking at friends’ photos from the European juggling convention that I’m not at this week!)
I guess economists would advise us that everything’s connected to opportunity costs, right? We can’t be everywhere or do everything, so we need to figure out how to make here and now less costly to us than elsewhere and elsewhen. And if those alternates seem so great, we can plan for them (not past ones, but future versions) to try to make them happen.
And of course, there’s always FOMO and it’s cousin, HOMO (Hatred of Missing Out), so we need to buck up against those as well. And we remind ourselves that the grass isn’t actually greener unless we fertilize it…whatever that might mean.
Economics cited in your reply! I like this reply. I have been working on being present as much as possible. This is the main idea: how can you engage the world in every task so you do not wish for time to go away or dread the time to come? I appreciate your posts!
Thanks for the kind words, Jarrod. At some point, I’ll have to tell you about my fabulous career in economics. Don’t worry, the story won’t take long.