I was reading the past week – Alain the Botton, Essays in love – and it’s a very catchy reading, that surprises you with every page; the nice thing about it is how it avoids the constant danger of falling into commercial, cheap literature, by being witty, philosophical and at points utterly accurate. Maybe I’ll discuss the love bits in the book a bit later, but for the moment I’ll focus on the chapter referring to the fear of happiness. Besides the tragic – hilarious finding that there’s actually a medical condition relating to this (anhedonia) – and the question that inevitably arises from this – why the f…k do we have to label any psychological reaction that makes us feel alive with a name that implies the necessity of a treatment? – the rest of the chapter is quite mind-challenging.
Let’s try to summarize it first, in a few quotations.
“One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy. Travel, like love, an attempt to follow a dream into reality.”
“Though the pursuit of happiness was our avowed goal, it was accompanied by an implicit belief that it would be realized somewhere in the very distant future – a belief challenged by the felicity we had found in Aras de Alpuente, and to a lesser extent, in each other’s arms. Why did we live this way? Perhaps because to enjoy ourselves in the present would have meant engaging ourselves in an imperfect or dangerously ephemeral reality, rather than hiding behind a comfortable belief in an afterlife. “
“The present had, for a brief moment, ceased to lack anything the future might hold.”
“(As a child) the future has some of the satisfactions and safety of the past. Every holiday grew perfect only when I was home again. And so the holiday, and much of my life generally, proceeded: anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.” (…) “The inability to live in the present (present imperfect tense) lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. If commitment is seen as a group of eggs, then to commit oneself to the present is to risk putting all one’s eggs in the present basket, rather than distributing them between the baskets of past and future.”
“It is easiest to accept happiness when it is brought about through things that one can control, that one has achieved after much effort and reason.”
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There is at least one piece of information in this chapter which I personally tend to omit quite often. That there is not such a thing as a perfect future. At it’s best, the future cannot hold more than our expectations of it. And for sure it cannot hold them all at once! It is important to dream, and to project ourselves into the future – to be able to improve, to grow stronger and wiser, to move on. But it’s as important to acknowledge that the dream is this, what we have at the moment. Each day we live is a dream come true, because we dreamed about this day at some point in our tiny existence. If we hadn’t we would not be standing here. And there is no point to wait for the future to happen all at once. Life comes in little portions, because otherwise we would not be able to digest it.
And if one honestly looks back to the past, one should be able to clearly distinguish the moments when one truly lived from the moments of fearsome planning of a future which never happened. Because there is no such thing as a future perfect tense (not in life, at least). And I come to think that the balance of these two types of memories is what decides, at the end of the day, whether you lived your life or not. Or to put it in the words of my friend Bettina, talking about a person obsessed with repetition, “if she could repeat her life, she would do it.” Which only means she planned too much, and dreamed too little. And never lived at all. Because if you manage to live at least a few perfect present moments, and maybe a few dozens present imperfect moments, you would never want to repeat your life and loose them.
And there’s one more point about living in the imperfect present tense that is the most fearsome. The fear to make mistakes. I did not live a whole lot and still clearly state that with 25 your life is just beginning (Nico – this is for you, especially !!!! ). But so far, I can say this – don’t worry, if you make a mistake you’ll have to pay for it all the way. Not at some point in the future, but right here and now, so whatever you think you did in the past, you can be sure as hell you’ve already paid your fair share for it.
So go on, idealize the past, analyze or blame it so you don’t re-live it….it’s ok. Plan a little bit of the future, so you can wake up and go to work the next day; dream a little more of the future, so you can still feel fulfilled later on….but live the imperfect, crappy, wonderfully exhausting and frightful present moment.
