Be in the here and now
There are many unfair expectations and non-functional fake-wisdoms in our Western well-being societies that make staying on the surface even harder. It's not enough to do your things well, wake up in time, eat, work, sleep, procreate and manage not being fired because of pathological procrastination, but, above all, someone up there expects you to even enjoy these things!
On the weeping voice of deep intellectual despair, I’m asking:
Why?
I'm asking you, bearded transcendental entity up in the sky! Don't pretend that you are not hearing me! Yes, I'm asking you, Elvis: why?
There was a guru, I don't know if he was Buddha or Jesus Christ or Silvio Berlusconi who said: 'This might be the last day of your life, so enjoy every moment of it, pal!' (I think it was Jesus Christ, it pretty much sounds like the things he used to say, and I must have read it in the Bible because that's the only magazine I have been reading lately.)
In my humble opinion knowing that this might be the last afternoon of your life is already enough to start breathing in a plastic bag until your face turns purple and you loose enough brain cells to become incapable of thinking about the finite nature of human existence. (Oh God, punish me for the hypocrite expressions I'm using. Humble opinion? Ancient Romans please come back and crucify me on an ironing board.)
If this is the last afternoon of your life, who dares expecting you to enjoy following up invitees of a bloody meeting? (Elvis, is that you? Stop dancing please for a second, and answer our deep existential insecurities. Being dead is a very lousy excuse for not even sending a reassuring text message from time to time. Jesus is dead too, but he still lets me know every now and then that he’s loving me: I read his message yesterday on the wall of the supermarket.)
If this might be the last afternoon of your life, then you should eat Thai food while receiving Thai Massage and having Thai sex and an intellectually challenging Thai conversation about your exceptional beauty with a Peace Nobel priced Thai porn star on the beach of Rio de Janeiro.(What are you saying? That Rio de Janeiro is not in Thailand? Hey, try not to get lost in the details please, but focus on the profound message of what I'm saying.)
If every afternoon might be the last afternoon of your life, then you should do the above mentioned activities every single afternoon. Is it feasible? Well, not really. So why would it make sense to remind yourself on death all the time?
But anyway, this is certainly not the last afternoon of your life: how could it be if you paid a lot of money for your gym membership for the next two months? Life would never be so unfair. Yes, children might starve in Africa, but still, there must be limits of injustice.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter if this is or isn’t the last day, as there cannot be any justification for expecting you to be present in the moments of a usual day:
1. Waking up when it's dark and cold outside and not finding anything in the fridge apart from some medication for eardrum inflammation. Although it seems eatable, when you check it closer you see that it has expired in 1984, so you have to go to work with an empty stomach. BE IN THE MOMENT
2. It's raining like hell outside, even your liver gets completely wet and you look like aquatic hen in her mid life crisis by the time you get to your office. ENJOY THE PRESENT
3. When you arrive your officemate offers you the contact details of a good hairdresser and a psychoanalyst. APPRICIATE EVERY SECOND OF LIFE
4. You arrive too late to lunch so the canteen is already closed. When you ask if they still have something left for you to eat, they confuse you with a beggar and they don’t let you leave until you finished with all the leftovers. BE OVERJOYED
5. Your boyfriend asks you in a restaurant if you wanted to be his wife. When you say yes, he tells you that he was joking, and after half an hour of hysterical laughing he calls his friend to tell him about the great joke he just made. Well, it's true that you could learn a bit faster, as this was the fifth time he made this joke in two months and you still said yes at the crucial moment. EXPLORE THE BEAUTY OF THE MOMENT
6. Your mother calls you and tells you that unfortunately you won't get anything from the grandparents' heritage, because your grandmother didn't know how to spell your name so she left it out of her last will, but no problem, because with your father and brothers they agreed on giving you grandma’s wheelchair what is almost new and only two wheels of it are broken. ALWAYS SEE THE HALF FULL GLASS
7. You see two children beating up a very small one in the park. When you run to them yelling to stop, the two aggressors start hitting your head with the small child. They don’t stop until you call them 'Master' and promise to pay a fee for entering the park every time from now on. SEE THE GOODNESS IN EVERYONE
8. A young mother starts crying for the police when you try to help taking out the baby carrier of the metro car. After some minutes of struggle you slowly start to understand that she doesn’t want to get out of the metro at your stop. It certainly doesn’t help that you're wearing your ex-boyfriend’s T-Shirt with the picture of Charles Manson. BE IN THE HERE AND NOW
It’s certainly the wrong approach to be present in the moments of boredom (40%), frustration (40%), frustrated boredom (9%) or bored frustration (8%). (Please forgive me of not talking much about the moments of satisfaction (2%), excitement (0,8%) and happiness (0,2%). I read too much Kafka between the age of 2 and 5 thanks to the educational principals of my parents: we didn’t have TV and this was the only way to keep me quiet when they wanted to have sex. First they tried to mix whisky in my milk, but when I started to call the old neighbour lady 'pussy queen', they switched to intellectual sedatives. Reading one page of The Castle made me feel so hopeless that I didn’t move nor made any noise for one week.)
So, my advice for making the best out of these few decades is to: BE IN THE THERE AND THEN!
Be constantly and consciously somewhere else in some other time!
For instance, while giving a boring power point presentation in the office, be in Paris in 1792 giggling at the execution of some howling aristocrats. Or while having lousy sex with your ex partner, be in the bed of James Dean in April 1953.
If you manage to be constantly somewhere and some time else, your life will be incomparably more exciting and rewarding. Yes, you might end up in a mental hospital, but there you can always imagine yourself being back in the office making lousy coffee for your bullying colleagues or preparing the world's most unnecessary PowerPoint presentation and then arrive to the point when you can indeed appreciate the present, the moments of peace in the company of the other kind fools, swimming together happily in your saliva.
