Restart

After several months of working on other projects, I have recently turned my thoughts back to Present Tense Living and the need for proper perspective about the time of our life.  Prompted partly by the hectic nature of my own family’s life—four school-aged children and all their activities can certainly fill up a schedule—and partly by lots of media attention on the issue of “balance” following the recent publication of books like Lean In, I have been reminded that a regular dose of perspective about how we use the time we have is still important.

I begin by reminding myself:  what exactly is present tense living?  At its most basic, “living in the present tense” means being thankful for the day you have in front of you—today—and making the most of it.  Do the task you have to do today with purpose; love the people you encounter today with abundance; appreciate the experiences you have today with gratitude.  Too often, much of our daily existence is taken up with lamenting the past or worrying about the future.  It is good to learn from the past, and to prepare for the future, but when those activities dominate our thinking, we can miss out on the pleasures of today.  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!

So as I look around my upper-middle-class American environment, do I see people living in the present tense?  Are we enjoying the people, places, and things that already surround us, or are we focused on the chase after more and different people, places, and things that might make us happy in the future?

Some of what I see is good.  Certainly many of us realize how fortunate we are to have come through the Great Recession with our jobs intact—especially in my field of banking.  The job we have may not be the perfect one, but compared to no job it is pretty good.  Some of the conspicuous consumption that drove so much spending before the recession has cooled off—we now realize that everything doesn’t have to be brand name all the time.

But the busyness of life, the speed at which we seem to be passing through our days, continues unabated and is probably still accelerating.  We continue striving to do more in less time; the mistake of multi-tasking is till rampant; the pressure to be “always-on” continues unabated; the temptation to upgrade and update is stronger than ever.  For example, I have a wired phone in my basement at home that is around 10 years old and works great, exactly like it always has.  By comparison, a 2-year-old cell phone (if you’re willing to be seen with one) seems quaintly outdated, and a 5-yr-old one probably doesn’t even work on a modern network.  We are encouraged to upgrade nearly every year, whether we need it or not.

None of the stuff we are pursuing is bad in itself.  The problem comes when we are running after it only because everyone else is, so that after awhile we can't remember why we started running, or how we ended up in this race.  Present Tense Living encourages us to pause to appreciate what we already have; maybe we don’t need to run quite so fast anymore to catch something we aren’t sure we want anyway.  Be deliberate about what you do; you want to follow the path you set, not the one your culture sets for you.  Money and stuff are nice, but they aren’t the point.  Relationships, experiences, memories—REM—will give you a much richer life.

As the recent excitement over books like Lean In shows, there is still a strong cultural push to “have it all” in America.  Our goal at PTL is not to tell you that you can’t have it all; our goal is to remind you (1) not to overlook the blessings of what you already have, and (2) to be deliberate about the “all” you are pursuing—it should be the “all” that you define, not the “all” that the world defines for you if you let it.

So ask yourself:  what am I so busy pursuing, and why?