Obsidian Sync 2024-12-02 11:15:19

content/daily-notes/2024-12-02.md

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+### 2024-12-02
+#### Meditations for Mortals
+Read Chapter 5 today titled _Let the future be the future
+On crossing bridges when you come to them_, and it feels like I needed it because I found myself worrying about 2025 and what it will bring for me.
+
+> There’s a tendency, in self-help circles, to portray worry as an act of irrational foolishness; but in the prehistoric environment in which humans evolved, it made perfect sense. Things happened fast there. If you heard a rustling in the bushes, it was vital to fixate on wondering what might be causing it, a reaction that was accompanied by a spike of anxiety: that response would have kept you alert until a few seconds later, when you could confirm it was only a harmless bird. The trouble is that today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not. If your worry concerns something less immediate than a rustling in the bushes – if it’s about, say, whether your application for funding will be approved when the grants committee meets the month after next – then there’s no useful behavior for your anxiety to motivate, and nowhere for it to go. So it lingers and loops, distracting you from the tasks that might actually have helped you construct a more secure future.
+>
+>…
+>
+>The fact that you can’t cross bridges before you come to them is liable to seem dispiriting, as if it leaves us with no option but to keep trudging vulnerably into the fog, trying not to think about sinkholes. But it contains a hidden gift. After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later. You get to stop fretting about literally everything other than how to spend the next instant in a wise, enjoyable or otherwise meaningful fashion. Finite human beings need never worry about anything else.