the wonderous waiting room

As many of you know I'll be heading into the Peace Corps in September, so my present day-to-day feels like a waiting room. When you have a huge event on the horizon that will significantly alter your life, everything prior feels like background noise or pre-movie credits.

But I've realized that this waiting room mentality isn't helpful. All it does is postpone life until some arbitrary date, assuming outright that you're plans will come about.

Now I'm 99% sure I will be going into the Peace Corps this year, but nothing is ever for certain. And living as if things are only causes us to delay living now.

Imagine the life of hunter-gatherers 50,000 years ago. They were living in the wilderness, surrounded by animals and natural events that could harm or kill them; living in a constant struggle for food and water. They were probably living more in the Now, out of simple necessity. Perhaps this is why many people seek extended backpacking trips and other wilderness pursuits such as hunting game: to reclaim the simplicity of only focusing on food, water, and shelter for an extended period of time.

Upon a superficial glance it might seem that our lives are much different from our ancient ancestors. Many people today don't struggle to acquire basic needs, and fact have so much that they don't know what to do with themselves. But I think at the core we are still hunter-gatherers with respect to the waiting room and living now. Nothing has changed about the nature of reality; it is still completely uncertain and subject to events you would have never seen coming.

Contemporary luxuries and material pursuits may veil this truth, but ultimately it is there, and I think everyone can agree completely unexpected things have happened in their lives. And yet still, knowing this, we struggle to live Now, usually planning ahead or looking backwards. Quite paradoxical.

When you watch a movie for the first time, you never know what's going to happen next. Even if the characters say what's coming, you know that there's always potential for plot twists and surprise events to keep you on your heels. It's part of what makes fictional media so appealing. The same is true with the movie of your life, it's just easily forgotten because of the time scale over which it takes place. Once you settle into routine, it's easy to ignore the fact that life is completely random and subject to plot twists, just like your favorite films.

I'm not proposing a mindset to adopt, or a strategy to hodgepodge into your personality. I used to do this, but there's plenty of other voices online taking that approach. I think instead it's a matter of destroying old mindsets and beliefs (and NOT replacing them with new ones) instead of adding to an ever-increasing Ego mountain. I hope that my writing today and in the future gives you the gasoline to light a wildfire in your mind, and burn out the dead wood.