Anyway, I was thinking about the fact that I think one of the things I’m finding hardest at the moment is not being able to plan for the future, and I think the reason for that is that I’m a relatively future-oriented person. I tend to be always thinking about what I want to do, how I want to improve things, having ideas etc, rather than talking about what I’ve already done.
But I think that these future plans, while they can be very motivating and inspiring, can also just be a way to boost your mood in the same way buying something or eating something does. It’s a short-term benefit rather than a long-term one. Because how often actually do those long-term plans come to fruition. I normally enter loads of races, and while some years that has helped my running, in the last few years it’s more often hindered it, either by leading to burnout or causing me to miss training that would have been more useful, or demoralizing me or stressing me out or because by the time the race comes round it would have been better for me to be doing a different distance or format altogether. But even though I’ve known this for a while I was having real difficulty actually stopping myself from continually entering more races. It was an addiction. Not the racing itself but the ENTERING of them. In just the same way we’re usually not addicted to the actual things we buy, but to the thrill of purchasing them.
My point here is that this inability to really plan for the future, and more importantly take action regarding those plans – booking a holiday or entering a race, for example – might be a good thing, if I can use it wisely. In the same way that the initial lockdown situation was good for me in that it stopped me making these constant random little purchases pretty much every time I went into town, but could just as easily have led to me making the same or more purchases online due to boredom – this situation could produce harmful or beneficial results. I could turn to other things for my thrills, we all know what they are – spending, drinking, sugar, TV, puzzles, etc etc. There’s plenty out there. I found myself – while watching a YouTube video – another one – seeing the vlogger talk about how much tetris he’d been playing on his NES – actually considering whether I should buy myself a games console. This from someone who discovered just a couple of months ago the amazing benefits of giving up TV and puzzles/games . It’s so compelling, and worse because no one would blame you. Almost everyone would tell you to go for it – it’s a tiny pleasure, to get you through a difficult situation, where’s the harm – just like they do when you mention that you’ve been drinking a little more or binge-watching boxsets or spending a little more on books and other Amazon gizmos.
But I think there is a subtle, relentless harm to these “small pleasures”, even if we don’t turn them into full-on credit card debt, or end up glued to the screen for hours a day, or drink two bottles of wine a night.
And I don’t have a precise handle on what that harm is except to say that, when I gave up TV for those 30 days, I felt better than I had for ages. I felt alive, I had tonnes of energy, and rather than getting to the bottom of my to-do list as I thought I would, so many more ideas kept bubbling up that my to-do list just kept lengthening. Rather than being bored, I gained more excitement about my life and could barely keep still for wanting to get on and get stuff done. It was awesome and slightly scary at the same time.
So, to bring this back to where I started, maybe not being able to get that short-term thrill from entering races or booking holidays, or even planning to do so, could turn out to be a good thing. Maybe instead, I could try to learn to be content with now. Or even, crazy as it may sound, I could do some of those things I have spent so much time planning to do but never found the time for because I was too busy moving on to planning the next thing.
All this is to say, simply put, that we can use this time of restrictions and limits on our freedom and lack of choice, to be more mindful, live more simply and enjoy what we have, instead of constantly seeking pleasure, fulfilment and comfort outside of ourselves and in some imagined future where everything will be somehow so much better than our real present.