You know how sometimes you just feel like you’re forgetting something?
Something is missing and you can’t quite place it?
I began feeling this way in October. It wasn’t a physical thing that I felt was missing. It was a way of thinking.
Something I’d discovered before, but had forgotten.
It was a certain mindset that I knew I really wanted to pay attention to in this moment.
So I opened up this box where I keep notecards of passages from my favorite books. The box is inspired by Ryan Holiday’s “Commonplace Book.”
And sure enough I found what feels to be exactly what I was missing.
It was like the second card I pulled. A quote from Jon Kabab-Zinn (author of the book I gift the most: Wherever You Go, There You Are).
It reads:
You may try acting out of a deep knowing of “This is it.” Does it influence how you choose to proceed or respond? Is it possible for you to contemplate that in a very real way, this may actually be the best season, the best moment of your life? If that was so, what would it mean for you?
It’s a powerful question to sit with.
We have these forward-leaning, future looking tendencies. And as Kevin Kelly discovered when he pretended he had six months to live and wrote about it, having a future is part of our humanity.
It’s part of what makes us human.
But all of the forward-looking comes at a cost.
The cost is forgetting that, like Kabat-Zinn says, in a very real way, this might well be the best season, the best moment of our lives.
It might not be. But for a lot of us, it might actually be.
What would that mean to you if it was? How would you be soaking it all in?