16 Jan Is that your dad?
‘Hey dad, you’re mentioned in The New Yorker,’ my daughter writes me in a text message, followed by a link to the article. ‘How do you know that?’ I ask. ‘A colleague forwarded it to me.’
The article is written by Joshua Rothman and is called: ‘Why are we tormented by the future?’ He calls it ‘the fresent’, the ‘future-present’. The future is squeezing through every pore into the present moment, both all those tasks and chores you still have to do and the doomsday scenarios you have about climate catastrophes or AI dictating our lives.
Push out from shore
Suddenly he introduces me, the Zen monk Paul Loomans: ‘Push out from shore and surf through time using trust and intuition as your guide.’ Joshua Rothman is talking about Time Surfing: The Zen Approach to Keeping Time on Your Side, the English version of Ik heb de tijd, een handeiding in Tijdsurfen. He certainly believes that the idea is correct, but wonders whether it is compatible with the future we are racing towards and that we would rather ignore.
Is that your dad?
‘Ping’, there comes another app from my daughter. ‘Is that your dad?’ Another friend points my daughter to a podcast from The Guardian in which I am also quoted.
This time it concerns an interview with Oliver Burkeman, the English author of the bestseller Four Thousand Weeks (the number of weeks a life has if you were to live to be 77). In his new book Mediation for Mortals, the 11th of the 28 chapters (read one every day!) is entitled: ‘Go to the shed’.
The right moment
This refers to the advice I give in Time Surfing: The Zen Approach to Keeping TIme on Your Side to first go and explore an overcrowded shed that is crying out to be cleaned up, so that it becomes your own. You have not done anything yet, but it no longer gnaws at you.
It is now in your system and the solutions will present themselves: those old flower pots can go with the bulky waste, someone will take them away. And a friend who likes DIY jobs can take that old bike.
The shed symbolises many things that will come our way in the future: Go and have a look, you don’t have to do anything yet. If you go and have a look, it takes the pressure off. The accusation that you are doing nothing also disappears.You know exactly what you want to do and wait for ‘the right moment’ to do it.