How much could we accomplish if we didn’t place limits on our own progress? I like to differentiate between constraints that are apparent to us in the natural environment and limits that we place on ourselves. For example, as a human being, I don’t have wings; that’s a constraint. But if I take that to mean I can’t fly, that would be a limit that I’ve decided to place on myself. There’s nothing about the absence of biological wings that prevents me from flying. For example, I can fly by simply buying an airline ticket. Or, if planes haven’t been invented yet, I could invent one. I’m sure at the time when planes were invented there were plenty of people who thought it would be impossible to fly but that had nothing to do with reality. It was just an artificial limit that people were placing on themselves.
What we need to do to work beyond these imaginary limits is to avoid getting caught up too much in the future. This is something of a paradox because in order to succeed later, we actually need to refrain from dwelling on that future moment. The reason for this is that the further our thoughts move into the future, the more uncertainty comes into the picture. We have to account for this when we make goals: longer term goals need to be more general in nature. If we try to make them too specific we’ll just end up limiting ourselves by thinking, oh but how are we going to do this? And how are we going to do that? Those are pretty useless questions if you don’t have much specific information about the context you’ll be working in when it comes time to take action.
Longer term goals are more important than short-term goals because we can make use of long time periods to accumulate more work in a particular direction. The simplest of all long-term goals would be our desire for happiness. If we have happiness as our goal, then we don’t need to have a specific idea of how that’s going to come about later. That would be far too limiting. Instead, a general long-term strategy is more effective. Here’s a general strategy that works: train yourself to be in the present moment. If in general you make choices that are conducive to present moment awareness, then in general, you’ll become happier. The reason this works is because when the mind is really in the present moment, suffering is impossible. Suffering comes from lamenting the past or worrying about the future so if we train to be in the present moment, we acquire immunity to suffering.
It’s strange but a big part of the reason we suffer is because we’re too concerned with knowing how we’re going to be happy later instead of just being happy now. Isn’t that funny? But we don’t need those specifics. All we need is the comfort of the present moment because that is certain to lead to goodness later. Sure, I agree that it doesn’t give us a crystal ball that we can use to determine how things are going to play out in a positive way but that is not required in order to be happy. If we let go of needing to know every future detail about how our lives will progress, we can finally start enjoying this moment right here.