It’s always struck me as a potent reminder that we can create all sorts of goals and ambitions for the future, but when we have a strong orientation to the future we can forget to live fully in the meantime.

This comes up regularly in my work as the ‘I’ll be happy when’ trap, where we defer or export our happiness out into the future until we have achieved something that has specific meaning and significance to us.  But as most people know (at least intellectually), that is not how life works as I wrote about in my recent article on mastery; when we do achieve a goal or outcome the feeling of satisfaction is fleeting at best and usually not what we had expected.

I sometimes ask my clients who find themselves preoccupied with the future whether they would choose the gift of being able to predict what is going to happen in their life. Some instantly reply no, whilst others pause for a moment, as if this is actually an attractive proposition, but then the realisation kicks in that to be able to predict the future takes all the mystery out of life, just as Kierkegaard wrote,

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.