If you’re aged between, say, 16 and 30, and you’re engaged in small talk at a social event, here’s what happens: questions. A lot of questions. Questions like:
What GCSEs are you taking?
What A-Levels are you taking?
What extra-curriculars are you doing?
Have you started to learn to drive?
Who are you taking to prom?
What do you want to do with your life?
What will you do when you leave school?
Are you going to uni? If so, which one?
Which courses will you take?
Where will you live? Who will you live with?
What will you do in your summers?
What will you do when you graduate?
Are you in a relationship?
Is it serious? Will you get married?
When will you get married?
Will you move in together?
Have you started saving?
When will you buy a house?
Where will you buy a house?
Will you have kids?
How many kids will you have?
What about work?
Oh, you like your job? Well, what’s the next step? Will you stay there?
WHAT IS THE PLAN?
Then, when out of nowhere, aged 29, you get diagnosed with cancer, these same people say:
What you really need to do is just live in the moment. Right here, right now, that’s all that ever really mattered.
Right.
So, you briefly attempt this living in the moment business. Being present is a spiritual discipline touted by pretty much every major religion after all – that is where life is found. But it soon feels impossible because, well, nobody else is doing it. Being in your twenties feels like one long conversation about the future. We’re just getting started, so new to the adulting game. Nobody is static for long, as there’s always something to go after, work towards, achieve. These are building years for careers, families, sense of self, places to live, hobbies and friendships. In your twenties, maybe more than in any other decade, your whole life can change in a few short months (and that’s before cancer gets involved). We’re focussed on the future both because we don’t know what our lives will be yet, and because everyone around us is so concerned that we’re on the right track.
The focus away from the present isn’t just confined to younger generations; if we’re focussed on the future, older generations seem awfully focussed on reminiscing about the past. People in midlife are having crises, burnt out from years of stress in jobs they never liked. The monks at the temple are taking photos of the sunset on their phones in the woods. Kids, who are usually living-in-the-moment-models, are so overloaded with extra-curriculars that they don’t have many moments left to live in. My friend said her baby was screaming because he was tired after attending not one but two baby sensory classes consecutively. This kid is the ripe old age of 1.
∞
Living in the moment should be intuitive really, as if everyone came with an instruction manual, the warranty sections would all clearly state that the future is not guaranteed. When you have a cancer diagnosis, the same manual contains the same line, but it’s highlighted, capitalised and in bold: THE FUTURE IS NOT GUARANTEED. But society tells all of us, no matter what our age or cirumstances, to STRIVE – ACHIEVE – KEEP PUSHING towards an elusive end goal that is forever and always out of reach.
In some ways it’s easier to be on this productivity rollercoaster, since when you’re in motion you don’t have to stop and think. Living in the moment is hard because you must feel what you’re feeling which brings an uncomfortable awareness to all that is painful or not working. Be it health, relationships, jobs… it’s harder to ignore a problem when you give it space to breathe. If we just keep swimming, we don’t have to notice how murky the water is and set about cleaning it.
∞
So how do we live in the moment when the moments are hard to live in? Navigating cancer at an age where your peers are house buying/getting married/having kids/building for a future (that you don’t know if you’ll have), boils down to a question that we all face: how can we be present in our lives when society decidedly encourages us not to be?
I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to this, but if there is it maybe has something to do with paying attention. Wordsworth talked about spots in time – moments in nature that can help people grow and learn something about life and loss. The sunset over the mountains, the lake sparkling in the sun, the blossom on the cherry tree, so fleetingly beautiful. Moments like these in the natural world are grounding, situating you within something much bigger, that was there long before you arrived, and will be there long after you’re gone.
Anne Frank wrote that being outside is the best remedy for being lonely or unhappy “for then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity… nature brings solace to all troubles.” These moments in nature are always available, noticed rarely, but help us “see into the life of things.” The more spots in time you notice, the more there are to notice. Maybe it’s keeping a store of these precious moments in our hearts that get us through the mundane and sad moments of our lives.
Living each day like it’s your last seems an antidote for an uncertain future, but living with that fear on your heels is exhausting. What seems more sustainable is building a life where each day contains something you love. Where you don’t require the escape of a holiday to stop and smell the roses. You can still watch Netflix all day in your PJs if you carve out 10 minutes to call a friend or get some fresh air or try a new recipe. In the words of Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” and these drops of time we spend doing things we love add up to a life filled with these things, rather than a life waiting to be lived and passing us by.
∞
If you answered any of the incessant questioning above with “I’m just going to see what happens”, people generally aren’t satisfied. But if you’re living in the moment, you kind of have to let life take you, let life surprise you. We blow leaves into neat little piles before a whoosh of wind blows them all over the place again, mocking our sense of control. Time will do what time does, and keep on going, while humans will do what humans do, and regret and plan and talk about things they will do one day and wonder why they didn’t do the thing yesterday. All the while the sun will shine, the birds will sing, and the sun will set again. All we really ever had to do is go outside, seal these spots in our memories, and enjoy the things we love.
Cancer treatment is gruelling and I hope never to go through it again, but the ejection from your normal life permits a weird reprieve from the hamster wheel. In the very worst of times, you see the very best of people. You are amazed at what love can do. Everything is so uncertain, planning is impossible, so you must go one day at a time. The moments are often grim, but you’re living them, with all the pain and beauty that they hold.
Be reassured that the moment you get the all-clear, normal questioning will resume. But this time you can smugly reply with the future is a theoretical thing – I’m all about living in the moment. Aren’t you?
Laura writes... 