Which Version of You Will Miss Today?
A quest for life.
I live far away, but I visit my parent's house from time to time. Family is a big part of me.
Research shows that we likely spend about 90% of the time with our parents until our twenties, and the remaining 10% is spread out throughout the rest of our lives.
Real life is what you get after you set your priorities.
This time, I sit at the common table before my mom and dad while I open a small book. The cover is from Harry Potter, and the book is over twenty-four years old. It is my childhood diary.
I was ten when I started writing on it. My oldest brother gave it to me as a Christmas present, and it’s full of wild things.
I still remember the adventurous feeling when I opened it brand new, curious about what a diary would be like. Now as I read it, I see that my name is half-written on the first few pages, the empty slots of stickers I used in elementary notebooks, random personal details, and a pledge to call 911 in case of an emergency.
You would read one eve of me dreading that I was starting school the next day. And the next day, me dreading that there are six months to finish school.
I stopped journaling after several days when I discovered my cousins reading my devoted secrets out loud. I was crushed. It was over.
Sitting with my parents, I see them and it gives me goosebumps to face it all. A sense of longing for what life was—a hollow feeling of missing it all.
The randomness of childhood.
The shakes of a first love.
The burdensome fears.
The meeting of (now) good old friends.
The dream building stage.
As I face my parents, I face those who smile at us with pride, accepting who we became by growing. I see the past and the person that I was and the moments that I miss.
And then it strikes me.
I will also miss the present soon.
Today will never exist again, not because of the date and time, but because people's beliefs, passions and personalities will change, too. “New is life,” said Anne Lamott, “when nothing new can get in, that’s death.”
In anthropology, this concept is called liminality. It refers to the time between roles, paths, and relationship stages. It is said that a significant change in life happens on average every eighteen months.
But even though we are different people, when we look at how we manage the present, we see many similarities between the person we are today and the child we used to be. I can read how I was in my diary, writing about the struggle in sports classes, the teachers, or my relationship troubles. I now ponder the struggle with work priorities, adulthood issues, or work and personal relationships.
Both versions of me, the young and the grown-up, with the same issues in different words. And also with the same miss of the present.
Always somewhere else but here. We struggle with this, repeating our mistakes and ruminating about the past or future. It is the hardest issue yet the most important one.
It is inevitable to decay, and worse, research shows that people are much more emotionally affected by losing something than by gaining the same thing.
The present becomes the ordinary point between lifequakes, where we think about the lifequakes. The present as a limit between the past and the future. The present as the consciousness of man’s thoughts and actions.
“Life is a garden, not a road.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote once, “We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.” I think that also applies to living in the present.
This time, when I found my diary I caught that feeling. But I travelled back in time. I saw my childhood with my older age sensing it—the gasping feeling, the wandering feeling, the fleeting feeling with a name: awe.
In addition to the six basic human emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise), psychologist Daniel Kletner shows the importance of pinching living the present with a sense of awe. “Almost everything that humans care about,” he said, “religion, art, music, big ideas, taking care of young children - awe is close to it.”
People who feel awe more often report feeling better with life. Awe does not make us stressed, materialistic, or isolated. Moreover, it significantly benefits physical health, gives us a positive sense of duty, and creates a more harmonious society.
This is also described as the sublime, which goes back thousands of years. Daniel Kletner studied it “from the Bible and Bhagavad-Gita to the writings of sociologists from the 19th century” Research strikes awe as a sense of vastness and a momentary inability to process it. Daniel highlights that “vastness could be physical, such as looking up at a cascading waterfall, or cognitive, like the vertigo you get when you think about something intricate or incomprehensibly large—photosynthesis, say, or the size of the solar system.”
Time plays with the changing versions of us, and we balance it with a sense of duty, pleasure, and rumination. However, awe is the one feeling we can regulate the most intentionally in our day-to-day lives.
“The instant was ‘pregnant’ filled with meaning,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe over two hundred years ago, “but it was also lived in all its reality and the fullness of its richness, sufficient to itself.”
Storyteller Matthew Dicks goes further by telling us that we all need to find our five-seconds moments every day. Moments in our lives when something fundamentally changes forever. Books are made with them. Movies are built around them. Small, sudden, powerful instants that can come as a realisation, an action, a comment, a feeling that makes us deviate for more.
More memories.
More learnings.
More meanings.
Through those five-second moments, through a sense of awe, we can find clarity and consciousness for the acts we need to make. Otherwise, what’s the alternative?
It’s crazy how I remember my cousins opening my diary decades ago and my dread feeling with it. And now I catch myself blogging online instead. Not only that, but writing with my favourite songs in the background and a big mug of coffee. That’s awe calling.
What are you doing now to live in the present?
People can find many ways to chase it. To plan the day to catch the day. Read a book. Do a hobby of joy. Listen to music. Meditate, pray, work the spirit. Do something hard. Live each day by trying to connect with close ones—parents, siblings, children, friends—to find awe in them.
As I share my visits back home with my loved ones, I notice that each visit is counted, that all the months I will spend with my parents alive would likely total a couple of years, and that it is up to me to set the mark of memories I will create for everyone together.
It is encouraging to find the present in moments of realisation when we use the right lenses. In the snapshots of unique versions of humans that will not return, that you share your life with.
On the second night, I told my mom that our moments are counted while I was in tears, more so because I live abroad. And in tears, she replied “that’s what it should be, that’s how life is.”
That is the version we shouldn’t miss.
[1] Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age - Bruce Feiler