Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [12]
The awaited event may even be lost in the mist of the most distant future. While we wait for our ship to come in or our prince to take us away, we remain day after day in the same limbo as the host whose guests have not yet arrived. We don’t let ourselves be wholly captivated by anything in the present, because the present doesn’t really count. It’s no more than a preliminary attraction, something to pass the time until the real show begins. When we have our degree, when the children are grown, when we come into our inheritance, when we retire, when all the onerous chores and duties that keep us from our heart’s desire are finally out of the way and everything is settled—then we will begin to live. But there’s a long stretch of time to be killed before the golden moment arrives. Meanwhile, we are restless and impatient from morning to night.
While we wait for the real show to begin, the whole of life may pass us by like an insubstantial dream. Our work is never our vocation. Our pleasures are only makeshift. Relationships are just for the time being. Everything we do is a species of thumb twiddling. We may not even know what we’re waiting for. In the trap of empty fixation, we look forward impatiently to a fate that we can’t even name. We don’t know what we will be when we grow up, and we never grow up. We’re certain only that we haven’t yet become who we really are.
But we need never wait to become who we are. We are ourselves already, and this is already our life. A prince isn’t merely a future king, a little girl isn’t just a woman-to-be. Princes, children, students, apprentices, unpublished authors, struggling artists, and junior executives are already something definite and complete. The maximum of life’s joys and sorrows is already open to them.
A great irony is hidden in extended fixation. When we finally become what we’ve waited so long to be, we’re liable to be overwhelmed with nostalgia for the good old days. A struggling young actor once gave his wife a bunch of grapes on their anniversary, wishing that they were pearls. Years later, having become a great success, he gave her a string of pearls and wished that they were grapes.
There are no preliminaries to living. It starts now.
t sometimes becomes clear that our plans have irremediably failed. The game is over and we’ve lost. The consequences of failure may be dreadful. Nevertheless, there’s nothing more to be done. Our moves are exhausted; the deadline is past. If we continue to occupy ourselves with the affair at this point, we fall into the trap of reversion.
We study the entertainment section of the newspaper, choose our favorite film, structure the evening so that we’re sure to have time to go, take a taxi to the theater—and find that the program has been changed. Or we’re held up in traffic and arrive late. Whether we decide to go in anyway or do something altogether different, our thoughts may revert again and again to the unconsummated agenda of seeing that film, or seeing it in its entirety. Naturally, this thinking doesn’t change anything. It’s a waste of time.
Reversion is the temporal opposite of fixation. In fixation, we work furiously to hasten an immovable future. In reversion, we labor to change the immutable past. We’ll see that most of the phenomena of fixation have their mirror image in reversion. There’s one important asymmetry, however. When the future, proceeding at its own pace, finally arrives, fixation is at an end. We have what we wished for, although our wishing was superfluous. But reversion never ends by itself. We can revert to old grievances and disappointments for the rest of our life, and still the past will remain the same. Our wish to alter it is not merely superfluous—it’s forever ungratifiable. The passage of time alone will often cure us of fixation. But we have to get rid of reversion by ourselves. Every reversion is potentially perpetual.
Fixation and reversion share a common strategic problem: