Living in the Present and Revaluating Checklists

When I became a Resident Assistant for my university’s freshman dorm, I created a list of quirky things about me that hung in our hall to help my residents get to know me better. It included categories like my favorite things, my least favorite things, fun facts, and so on. One of the categories was “Things I want to learn” and the list looked like this:

·         How to spin a basketball on one finger

·         How to rock climb (like real rock climbing, none of this rec-center crap I did when I was 10)

·         Survival camping

·         Lock picking

·         A magicians secrets

·         How to speak sign language

·         How to use a sewing machine

·         Typing computer code

Don’t ask me why some of these things appeal to me, they just do.

Anyways, this is very typical me. Not necessarily the content of my list, while yes those are very me as well of course, but the list itself. My last post talked about one of my other habits of self-doubt – well, my next life habit is somehow making everything in my life a list. Everything.

This list above is the perfect example; I’ve literally taken my hopes and dreams and compacted them into a “to-do” list I can check off. It’s been a habit of mine from childhood and it’s proved to be both beneficial and damaging in all aspects of my life. On one hand, it makes me organized and reliable; I will actually get everything done in a timely manner and I will not forget a thing. I have gained a lot of success this way because it allows me to organize my thoughts into very realistic patterns that in turn, allow me to complete the tasks at hand. But that’s kind of the reason this habit sucks too – life becomes a task I can check off my to-do list.

For the longest time, I didn’t realize that this sort of mindset was actually making me quite miserable. I mean, I knew I was sad and I knew something was off, but I didn’t know why or how I could stop feeling that way. It felt like I always had something impending hanging over my head – like a boulder out of a child’s cartoon with the rope slowly snapping till it’s merely a thread. No matter what I did, no matter what context I was in, I always felt this boulder waiting to drop on my head and smash my skull in. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why I felt this way.

It took me many years of feeling like this for me to finally develop a theory on why this boulder existed for me. There was a common theme running throughout how I would go about my day, my week, my month, my year. With every moment I was given, I would turn it into a list. Let me give you an example, because I realize that this concept is bizarre.

I wake up in the morning, and immediately there is a list in my head of what I must complete in the next [insert time sequence here] for me to accomplish what needs to be done for the day. Wash face, brush teeth, put on clothes (that I most likely already laid out the night before), makeup, hair, grab backpack (also previously prepared), double check everything, leave.

Then, onto the bigger list. Breakfast for 15 minutes, walk to class takes 5 minutes, class, meeting at 10:30, lunch for half an hour, class, break for 1 hour, meeting, meeting, dinner for half an hour, meeting, back to the dorm. And inside this list is another list to accomplish; I often keep it written in my phone so that I can’t forget them. It’s the real “to-do” list. Like, visit abroad office to get USB stick, drop off papers at iPulse, send email to John about pitch… and so on for about ten other things depending on the time of year.

This is a vague description of what’s going on in my head. Throughout the day, this list is constantly being checked off, re-arranged, and modified to fit what’s going on.

It becomes like a challenge every day to complete the list and as many “to-do” items as possible. Only then, am I allowed to sleep.

I’m not trying to sound like a sociopath with no feelings, a work-laden laborer who just can’t catch a break, a person struggling with OCD, or anything like that. I’m definitely not. I have tons of fun things inserted into those schedules and lists that keep me from remembering the boulder hanging over my head and that have gotten me to the happy person I am today. Ask anyone I know and they will tell you I constantly have a smile on. Again, not in a sociopathic way.

What I am trying to say is this: I, like millions of other students and people in general, live life as a check list. I literally live to get the next thing done. I focus so intently on accomplishing as many things as possible on my self-made checklist that my subconscious actually creates a non-existent boulder hanging over my head so that my conscious self feels enough drive to finally check off that non-reachable “last item.” My motivation? I have an innate feeling that once that “last item” is crossed off, I will finally be at peace because there will be no more checklist. Deceiving right? A checklist meant to get you to no more checklists.

It’s no wonder why I have battled anxiety attacks for the last few years – I have created an imaginary elusive goal that I can never attain so that I will never stop striving. It’s a normal thing for our minds to do since it helps me function and maintain sanity. But the primitive mind most times lacks the awareness of our spiritual needs for non-survival things like love, relationships, and ultimately happiness. It’s looking out for our physical survival, not our emotional well-being. That’s where the rest of our brain comes in and says “You’re working way too hard, here, take a seat and enjoy that wonderfully fattening caramel Frappuccino for a sec.”

Well, at least that’s what mine says.

Millions of people feel a similar way, and those same people are the ones struggling with over-diagnosed illnesses such as anxiety and depression. I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a licensed therapist but I believe that many of these types of illnesses are from similar feelings of unfinished business or meaningless existence.

We’ve figured out many times throughout human history that all of nature seeks out peace. Even in science, the universe is constantly using up its energy so that it can reach an ultimate level of silence and balance. Humans innately seek the same thing inwardly, and the best of our kind have acknowledged it in many ways, but perhaps my favorite of all comes from the Dalai Lama:

“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

This quote, along with another similar one I will post at the bottom of this, quite simply flipped a switch in my head and made me revaluate how I was cashing in the minutes of my life. I thought back to how I spent every New Year’s celebration thinking of how remarkably fast the year had gone by, and how sad I was that I had blinked and it was over. I remember one year I even made it my New Year’s resolution to “slow down time” and I went about finding out how best to do such a thing. My conclusion was this:

The more I focused on making every minute of the day a task to accomplish, the faster life went by me.

It all started with the smallest unit – I would constantly be working to “just get to 5:00” then from 5:00 it would be “just get to Wednesday” which became “just get to Friday,” to “just get to December,” where I inevitably found myself sitting on a bar stool at another New Year’s Eve celebration with a melting drink in my hand and a deafening thought in my mind, “This year was even faster than the last.”

At what point do I get to my 99^th New Year’s Eve party and think to myself, “I wish I had been happy all those years.” Which by that time, it is sadly too late, and the one life I had given to me is wasted constantly living for the future, only to regret the past and neglect the present. This, truly, must be the meaning of non-existence.

So, have I made you cry yet? Perhaps question the meaning of your life, sitting there staring at the computer screen in a dark room where the only thing to keep you company is your morbid thoughts about death and the afterlife? I’m so, so sorry for bringing you down buddy. Seriously, if I could give you that Frappuccino I spoke of earlier, I totally would right now. So sorry.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Questioning our existence, making mistakes, reconfiguring our lives and our mentalities over and over again is what life is about! René Descartes would even assure you that simply thinking this stuff means you’re living – Right. Now.

Slurp on that Frappuccino my friend, for today we live!

Upshot: checklists are good in moderation. Just like anything else, they can become a danger to our mentality and literally threaten our existence. They’re fine for organizing and keeping things in line but be careful that they don’t morph into your stream of consciousness, like they did for me. Just as with anything else, even the most insignificant habit can snowball into becoming a way of life. Living in the present is difficult, especially for those of us that have been born into a culture where immediacy is worshiped. The key to slowing down time and elongating your life, is to saturate it with being present and choosing happiness in the moment. It may only be a moment, but it can be a moment more of happiness than of stress. It’s okay to dream of the future and it’s okay to remember the past, but it’s not okay to live in either one. Give yourself a spiritual break and let go of the lists and schedules! It's okay to designate time to doing something that genuinely makes you happy, as hard as that may be. Practice, practice, practice.

And finally, to leave you with the quote that became my mantra for practicing happiness; a sort of summary of what the Dalai Lama spoke of in line with Buddhist teachings:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

-          Lao Tzu