Wishing your life away

Have you ever started the day - or week - knowing that it’s going to be full of challenges, and thought ‘I can’t wait until it’s over’? Or maybe you’ve had an important presentation coming up, and think ‘everything will be ok once the presentation’s finished’.

I remember in my early days of working as a backpacker, I’d live for the weekend – just like everyone else around me. We knew that the days would be hard, but kept telling ourselves that it didn’t matter, because we just had to make it through to Friday night, and the weekend would make up for it.

The problem for me was that I became so focused on wishing for a future point in time, that I missed out on so much that was happening around me. I was at work physically, but my mind was full of thoughts of what might happen at the weekend, or would be occupied by any thought that would distract me from the work I was doing. I didn’t hate my job, but I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to be there, and that some future moment was going to be so much better.

When the weekend arrived, there was so much pressure to have a good time on the Saturday, that I never really enjoyed the moment. By Sunday, I was thinking that the week was coming which distracted me from actually enjoying the day off.

I was living almost entirely in my mind. Towards the end of the week I would be wishing Friday night would come quickly, and Monday and Tuesday would be spent reminiscing about what had happened the past weekend. I have very few memories about what I was doing during those weekdays, as I spent most of it in my mind.

I didn’t even realise this was going on. It was normal for me to live in my head, rather than experiencing what was happening around me.

A similar thing happened during my career when I had an important pitch, or presentation. I would focus on the upcoming event, playing over in my head what may or may not happen. I would keep telling myself ‘don’t worry it will be over by Thursday’. I’d say it as if it was some insightful tip, but if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that by Thursday night the presentation would be over. I wouldn’t even say ‘I can’t wait until it’s over and I’ve done a great job’, I’d just focus on it being over. Always looking into some future moment, staying completely distracted in my head.

The irony is that you can only experience these thoughts in the present moment. They were thoughts I was having about a potential future event, but I wasn’t in that moment yet, at that point I was just thinking about what may or may not happen at that event. If I’d let those thoughts go, and focused my attention on what was happening right now, I wouldn’t have been so worried.