The Only Time You Have is Right Now

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own”

Matthew 6:34

Diets suck. In fact, the notion of them is virtually intolerable because they force us to take actions we truly don’t want to take. No more cake. No more casual dinners out where you don’t have to stress out about what you will order. The luxury of dipping your hand into a bowl of mixed nuts or accepting an impromptu glass of wine from a friend is gone.

But it’s even worse than that.

The real rub is that in order to do this “lifestyle change” thing successfully and permanently, it must be done FOREVER.

However, I believe that words like “forever” and “tomorrow” aren’t actually real things. They don’t really exist. I know that sounds kind of woo woo, but stay with me. We actually exist on the knife’s edge of time. The future has not yet happened so it is a fantasy; what is coming for us is only a projection conjured by our imagination. The past is merely a memory of events that cannot be altered. By extension, the notion of “forever” truly has no human meaning if you think about it. Rather, tomorrow and forever are magical constructs that our minds use to order our world. I promise to explain all this in a minute, but first let’s focus on what your flesh says when the thought of “forever” enters your mind:

“Are you saying I can never eat dessert again for the rest of my life?”

That is a pretty catastrophic notion. But let’s back that cognition up a bit. The thought happens to be just another convenient rationalization we use to indulge. “You only live once!” However that is just not the way to think about it.

By using the magical construct “forever” we make the behaviour intolerable. Instead we should only commit to this:

“I am not going to eat the cake that has just been offered to me, today”

You only need to worry about today: let tomorrow worry about itself.

This is what 12-steppers are getting at when they say “One day at a time”. What they mean is that you shouldn’t try to project into the future when it comes to deprivation. On that point I totally agree with them. You only need to worry about RIGHT NOW. This is because life is actually just a long series of “right now’s” that when strung together lead to the kind of life we’ve ended up having. All choice is made in the present. Remember that temporal knife’s edge we sit on? The current moment is the only place where we can take actions that shape our lives. The past is too late. The future hasn’t happened.

But here is a lie that your irrational self -the flesh- uses to get what it wants. We use the future as a bargaining chip to get what we want in the present all the time. We make these special mental exchanges to get what we want in the moment.

“I will buy this Apple Watch now and IN EXCHANGE I will start saving aggressively next month” or “I will watch Netflix all evening and IN EXCHANGE I will then work on my class assignment all weekend”. Of course if you’re reading this blog, food bargains might be your number one exchange. “I’m going to eat this amazing feast now and tomorrow I will start on my diet”. We purchase the present by promising away our future.

Notice how we make big (and useless) mental bets about the future to get what we want now. I will eat this piece of pie now and then I will NEVER eat pie ever again. What a great deal! But of course the next piece of pie inevitably finds its way to our dinner table and we have long forgotten that bargain we made with the devil. This is just our fleshly self, selling us a slick con. He’s like a friend who always asks to borrow five bucks, but never pays you back. Even more than that: he is a con artist who promises you the moon if you just give him what he wants now. He is an addict who says “Just one more hit, then I will clean up forever.”

No, we must not commit our futures in that way. We must take everything as it comes in real time. One day at a time. It is extremely powerful to say, “I am in control of my choices, and I may choose differently tomorrow if that’s what I want”. Saying “I am going to follow this diet for the rest of my life” is like saying “I am going to live in this town or I am going to drive this brand of car for the rest of my life.” How can you say that? And what if you secretly long to live somewhere else? Such a commitment is nonsense.

As an aside, the present moment is also where we make every good thing happen in our lives. Let me explain what I mean. Actions of any kind can only happen in the present moment. Generally speaking, moving our life forward in any arena, whether in fitness, or financially, or in our relationships requires actions to be taken. The trouble is that we often procrastinate or dissociate because of fear that things won’t work out as we planned. Have you ever finally taken a big step and then said “That wasn’t so bad, I should have done this years ago!”? The fact is, you probably DID think about doing that scary thing years ago. If only you had taken action back then, what would the result be now?

Yet I have seen time and time again that we tend to time-travel. We either dwell in the past as we ruminate about old decisions and events or we dwell on the future, constantly dreaming about how things could be. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually get us anywhere (with a few exceptions).

No, we only have control of the present moment to get things done. We should be aware, however, that our flesh also keeps us from doing what we know to be right (James 4:17). Pressfield calls this “The Resistance”. We have only been thinking about our animal self as something that makes us do things we don’t like. But it also holds us back from doing the good we ought to do: taking positive steps forward.

So in practice when it comes to dealing with temptations of any sort, when you send something into the future, you are sending it into non-reality because the future doesn’t exist; you are essentially making that thing disappear. And when you think about how you need to make permanent dietary changes, projecting the cost into “forever” makes the cost intolerable, because infinity trumps everything else.

Instead, you will simply choose to eat in a healthy way “today”. Don’t think about tomorrow. Then when tomorrow arrives, choose to be in control “today”. What will happen is that those “todays” will string together over time and radically alter the course of your life.