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?

The Background of Present Tense Living

I've just spent two weeks of vacation in the Smoky Mountains during which I did no writing, but did do lots of thinking about writing. Specifically, while gazing at distant peaks, I found myself inspired to return to first principles and describe, for myself and my readers, just what I mean by "Present Tense Living" and what is the philosophy that drives my musings.

But before I set forth the philosophy, I think it will be helpful to provide the background for my thinking about matters of time and life. It is now a trite observation that life in the 21st century moves very, very fast. The immediacy with which we can communicate, research, and share information would be unthinkable to anyone living just 75 years ago. With current technology we can do more work, alone, from our living rooms than our grandfathers could do in their offices with an assistant or two at their disposal.

And as these things seem to go, once we CAN do work anywhere, it quickly becomes the norm that we SHOULD do work anywhere. The pressure to be always available, productive, and active is relentless, both from our employers and from our families, friends, and even ourselves. We can do more in less time, the thinking goes, which is unquestionably good because if we do more, we can have more, and then we will be happy.

As I pointed out in this early post, I was eventually struck by the fact that all my busyness wasn't necessarily directed at things I meant to be, or wanted to be, doing. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of the busyness was a front; that in a culture that worships work, to appear NOT to be busy is to be a misfit, a "nerd," as it were. Plus, if the do more=have more=be happy equation holds, then all the busy people around me should be very happy. Yet, my own observations of my friends and colleagues, plus anecdotal evidence from articles and surveys, shows that Americans as a whole aren't any happier now than they were 40 years ago. Could it be that the entire premise under which we are all living is false?

So, against this background of pressure to constantly do more, to be better, to have it all, I began wondering if there was another way. I eventually realized that all this searching for the next big thing, for the key to happiness, caused me constantly to be living in the future. (Once I get _______, then....." or, "As soon as I finish_______, then........") On the other hand, when things didn't go just right, the thing to do was search my past for something or someone to blame. ("If my parents hadn't _______, then.....", or "If my old boss had only _________, then......") In essence, like most people, I was always either looking forward or backward--anywhere but in the here and now, appreciating what I had today. I began wondering: how much of life right around us do we miss, because we are scanning the horizon in front of us or behind us looking for something else? What if I could learn to live in the present, appreciating and enjoying the world around me, today, and what I already have rather than getting caught up in the constant scramble for more, more, more? Perhaps that could be a happier existence, even if it meant doing less or having less over the long run.

Thus began my reading, thinking, and writing about life in these fast-moving times, and how to "live in the present tense." Over the next few posts I'll outline my philosophy as it exists today, based on my reading and writing and thinking so far. Some of it will be new, some of it is just explicitly stating some of the principles I've already referred to in this blog. You may agree with it or think I'm crazy, but I hope to at least encourage you to think about why you are doing what you are doing, and whether it is the best way to live a full life. Let me know what you think.

Time Management

I went to Amazon.com today and in the Books section did a search for "time management." There were over 75,000 results!! Meanwhile, a search for "money management" yields just under 27,000 results. Amazing, when you consider that while there are many different levels of monetary wealth, we all have exactly the same amount of time each day. But the pressure to make the most of that time is relentless--hence the need for 75,000 books.

Living in the Present Tense, of course, isn't exactly about time management. You can use any of those 75,000 methods you want to manage your daily affairs. What present tense living is about is how we view time. We are trying to remove the pressure to maximize every minute, both today and forevermore, and instead live in the present tense: enjoy each moment, each day, one day at a time. Yes, some of those days will be filled with activities; hopefully some of them will be less crowded with appointments; but all of them are opportunities to serve God and others with our activities and presence.

I hope in learning to live in the present tense you'll discover ways to identify and relish those opportunities.

How It All Began

A couple of years ago I made a homecoming trip to my college alma mater where I visited with several old college friends. We spent the weekend recalling the many experiences we had shared during those years, both fun and otherwise: parties exciting and boring, intramural games won and lost, fraternity pranks successful and foiled. It was great fun reliving the old days, and on the way home my wife Sylvia, who had been a good sport to sit through the weekend listening to it all, asked me, "Why don't you have friends like that anymore?"

"Because I don't have time," was my answer, an answer that got me thinking. Why don't I have time to have friends? What am I doing with my time? As I began to be more aware of how I was spending my time, and more deliberate in deciding how to spend it, I gradually came to realize that for too long I had been doing a lot of things solely because I thought I was "supposed" to do them: that was just what people like me did. I was "keeping up with the Joneses" not only in material possessions but in time management, too.

I came across a book by Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed. His epiphany came when he found himself reading one-minute bedtime stories to his two-year-old in an effort to save time. Preposterous, right? And yet I realized that I too, in a misguided quest to maximize personal efficiency, was shortchanging my family, my friends, and myself in a quest to do more, more, more. When the kids were little and I was caught up in a flurry of diaper changes and feeding times, it was tempting to think, "I can't wait until this phase is over." But be careful what you wish for, because in the blink of eye it is over, and the kids are gone. I was so caught up in doing the stuff that dads do that I was missing the joys of being a father. What else was my crazy busy schedule causing me to miss? Should my life really be measured only by my productive output?

And so began the personal journey that has become Present Tense Living. How do I spend my time? Why do I spend it that way? What do I want to do with my time? What does God want me to do with my time? Perhaps these questions ring true for you, too. My purpose for exploring them is not a quixotic effort to do nothing--I'm not ready for early retirement--but instead is my attempt to ensure that I spend my time in the way that I want to based on my God-given talents, abilities, and desires. It is fine to be busy. But I want to be busy on things that matter to me.

Do you feel in control, or out of control, of your time?