walking in very saggy old shoes

What am I doing?

I've always described myself as someone who lives "in the moment" and readily proclaim myself as such without hesitation. I think it carries good logic because most of the people that I meet who are significantly older than I am seem to have a lot of regrets from their youth and a thinly-veiled yearning to be young again whenever I talk to them. By living in the moment, I don't anticipate having this problem. Countless people frown on the notion of "living in the past," but it clearly happens as the future you look forward to steadily shrinks away with time; you simply have less to look at in that direction. For this reason, and others, I support neither living in the past, nor living in the future (oft-considered good and bad advice, respectively), but living in the present.

I don't have a whole lot of experience living in the past so it makes me uneasy to be envied by older people for no reason other than my age. Nevertheless, it happens all the time and I really don't know what to say to them. What I want to say is, "Deal with it, it's the passage of time--it's not my fault I was born on the cusp of Generation Y--it's not my fault that you don't know how to program your cell phone and I do."

But I don't say that because they're not listening. It's easy for me to fall under the false impression that "envy" is the same as "respect" in this situation when they are really two completely different animals. Envy is a self-absorbed niche and when older people who seem to have some underlying issues about being old, their envy of me or people my age seems to blind them to the fact that we are people who have developed individual personalities. Instead, we are overcome by repeat exclamations as to how beautiful we are and glassy-eyed stares that make you feel like the centre of attention, when really, their own memories and their own distant life in the past is the true focus.

Sometimes, I am able to say other things that break this trance. Sometimes, people are listening just enough that they actually process what I'm saying and when that happens, I find I'm much better off at establishing some sort of working relationship with them. I operate much better with words than making impressions and my physical strengths are largely overshadowed by my mental ones. To have that recognized by a total stranger who spent the bulk of the conversation mesmerized by my age rather than my input shows a strength in their character--an ability to read between the lines a little and see that although there is beauty in youth, it doesn't mean that beautiful young people get that beauty from their age alone.

Lately though, I've been questioning my approach. Or rather, I'm questioning the angle at which I am approaching things. This applies to both the traits I consider valuable in others (i.e. that ability to read between the lines) and my mantra of living in the moment. I have to make a run at both of these daily philosophical challenges because they define my conduct but I've hit an interesting road block in my life. Before now (at least in adulthood, for what that's worth), I was pretty convinced that my values were the right ones, my ethical framework was respectable and I was sufficiently kind, caring and generous enough to be considered a great person in the eyes of others. I believed this and stuck to it in spite of the fact that my own personal life seemed to ultimately collapse around me and I was destroying myself from the inside out. When that collapse happened, I retained the values and state of mind that I had established as a happy person because I was so convinced that it was the right approach. It's easy to draw a dotted line between these two items now and say, "Well duh, Randall, you gotta change your approach--look what's happening to you," but even now, I'm not sure they are related.

I first established this confidence in my conduct while overcoming great hardship in the interest of reaping an even greater reward. The effect of actually accomplishing that, defeating the odds and claiming the prize was so potent that the idea of changing my "approach" seemed completely insane. It took a lot of years of frustration to drum up some sort of personal mode of thought that actually works--why waste that when it has proven potential to be so right?

Then again, it hasn't yielded a great deal of good times for many years now, so I begin to question why I'm attached to my approach and whether or not it is indeed the right one after all. It's hard to go from being so very certain of something to having your sense of reality questioned by your own mind. Like discovering that there's no Santa Claus by accident when you're five years old--it's just unsettling. In any case, I have yet to hit this extreme anyway and am only feeling slightly detached from my own behaviour, meticulously picking it apart as an overhead observer. Looking for faults. Finding a few, even.

But what keeps those happy people going? That's what I wonder. Am I doing something wrong by just fluctuating between indifference and malcontent all the time? I thought I had this shit figured out! So, I'm forced to question what it is exactly that I need to change to be happy, without sacrificing what it is that already makes me a good person (...or what I...think? makes me a good person??).

Once again, I tend to live a life of casual spontaneity, cherishing the moment and spending less of my time working to build a brighter future, especially if it makes for a darker present. Like I always say, the present is all you'll ever get to experience; why not make the most of it?

Even so, I've been weighing the pros and cons of living in the future, a concept I readily abandoned without much consideration after having been so thoroughly convinced of the practicality of living in the moment. One might reason that if the present in which you live becomes too dark to live in, you can achieve a happier outlook by dreaming of a better future and spending all of your time and effort trying to build it. Whereas my point of view dictates that most of your time and effort should be spent on building the best out of what you have, with respect to building for the future well enough that you can maintain that routine until death, I guess. Maybe I just never considered it worthwhile to spend 5 or 10 years in complete misery just to achieve a wonderful 40 years afterwards. It seems like it's ridiculous that you can't be happy every year and that somehow there's no way of achieving that. In fact, I know it's ridiculous. I've gone entire years where I was happy every day. If you can do it for consecutive years, I don't see why a whole lifetime is out of the question--you know, scatter in a few bad days every third Autumn or something just to make it real and voila! Bury me a happy man.

Knowing that it's possible makes it harder to achieve happiness by default. It sets the bar. I'm not sure how high I can jump anymore--maybe not high enough. I think maybe instead of leaping for the bar, I'll do some training instead--build some leg strength, some agility--think about the future.

Who wants to live in this moment anyway?