Our human awareness and conditions have changed subtly in the last few centuries. For millennia our focus on the future was mostly the next few days, or at best the coming seasons. To speculate about tasks or problems beyond the next year was rare.
Today we live in what is called a delayed-return environment, where much of our anxiety and hopes are about real or imagined problems that may take weeks, months, or years to appear—or may never occur at all. Our ancestors worried about their next meal or the chance of a wild animal nearby. Today we get caught up in loops of worrying and endless speculation about events far in the future. The dangers of our forefathers are not our agenda anymore.
Our measures of uncertainty, control, and risk are no longer about the immediate future but about distant times. We are so blessed but still manage to get more anxious and agitated than our caveperson ancestors. With so little real danger we manufacture misfortunes that are only remote possibilities, delayed for months or years before they may or may not happen.
The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Restated, we imagine challenges far ahead and wonder if we will prevail. But the way we manage today is the same way we will manage tomorrow. If our tools of reason work today, they will work later. If they are weak now, the answer is not to fear tomorrow but to improve our coping abilities today.
Often we waste energy worrying about the weather for next year’s holiday or the value of retirement funds. We fight tomorrow’s battles today, and we lose awareness by not being present in the moment. We try to control and manipulate the future now. Yet most of these imagined events are outside our control, dependent on many other happenings, and their chance of ever occurring is remote.
If we can manage our present “bridge crossings,” then future bridges will likely be handled too. Improving how we meet today’s circumstances is the best training for later concerns. What are you learning now from your current successes and misfortunes? These are the lessons and skills that will help you through delayed-return environments months and years away. When those future bridges come, you will probably have the strength to cross them. Rather than becoming anxious about tomorrow’s bridges, build beautiful resilient and strong bridges today and enjoy the views as you cross.
There will always be bridges to cross in the future. But we also cross bridges today. Better to cross today’s bridges today and leave tomorrow’s bridges for tomorrow.
*: Inspired by "Meditations for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman