Past, Present, Future!

Everyone talks about living in the moment and I do “get” the sentiment of that, being present, acknowledging what is right here, right now, and engaging that set of realities. But I also have to acknowledge why my mind wanders and why I find myself savoring the great moments of the past (and, if I’m truthful, embellishing on them) and projecting myself into some warm, imagined future where all the hassles of today are done and I am free to do all the things I’d rather do.

Foolishness, huh? I agree but it is where I tend to live my life – in the spaces surrounding the now – the past, carefully sorted out to diminish the unpleasant realities, and the future, carefully constructed to allow me to put one foot in front of the other an move forward believing that there is a hopeful finish to it all!

Is that a good way to live? Well, if I have to defend it, I’m going to say, “Hell, yes!” But, if I can step aside from the realization that it is ME I’m talking about, I have to admit that all of this is simply a rationalization, a ruse, to avoid the painfulness of the present I have constructed from myself.

The present (this summer, this time right here and now) is a most unpleasant place. I have been consumed for 10 weeks with one thing, completing the requirements of a 4-hour graduate course that should have been great fun, but wasn’t. Yes, there were moments of great fun (those brief events where living in that moment made the whole semester worthwhile) mainly because there were some delightful successes.

Now these are not the sort of successes most folks could recognize, but for a mid-life adventurer, moving through a world of new information that is confusing, contradicting and often complicating to the learning I’m engaged in, the successes were brief but beneficial. Things like palpating my first prostate gland (no, it wasn’t MY prostate gland, but it was the first one my finger had successfully felt, in a clinical way!). Or actually remembering the five essential health promotion questions to ask during a clinical breast exam (ask the questions when you’re palpating her breasts and she doesn’t have the concentration to lie about whether she wears seat-belts in the car of has guns in her house!).

Hopefully, I will be able to catalogue them among my “great moments of the past” and resurrect them when once again I find my present full of dismal realities. And it is not as though they are few or far between. They merely pale in the reality that the summer has been full of stress, clutter, delayed gratification, disappointments, settling for less, tolerating, putting-up with, doing-over and doing without.

There are two weeks between the end of this semester and the start of the next (yep, two weeks!) and I intend to “savor the moment” on each and every one of those 14 days that separate the summer from the fall in terms of the school calendar. I can’t possibly make up for all the deficits of the last 10 weeks but I can reach deeply into the fleeting pleasures of summer and drink up all I can in this end-of-the-season binge of relief. What will I binge on? Simple things to be sure. . .

• I want to clean my house, and finally put a load of laundry away, rather than just scattering it onto the guest-room bed so I can wear it again the following week.
• I want to invite friends over for a pot-luck and show off that great grill we bought at the end of last year’s season and have only had a few chances to use this year.
• I want to actually visit the gym near my house where I purchased a membership but rarely go because even though it is a 24/7 work-out place, I am only an 18/7 kind of person who needs at least 6 hours for sleeping on a regular basis to avoid automobile accidents. So, my presence ant the gym has been less than consistent to date.
• I want to swing a golf club (duffer that I am) and flail away at that annoying little pink sphere that seems to have a mind of it’s own as soon as it leaves the tee. Not because I’m any good at it or because the tendonitis in my shoulder is helped by the over-use I put it through just to complete nine holes. I do it because for the brief 90 minutes that I’m out there with the bugs and the sunscreen, I feel like a genuine person, with a life and maybe even a lifestyle (God forbid!).
  

So here I go, plunging into the sacred space between the summer and the fall, the moments I intend to savor over the next two weeks that will permit me to feel human again. And I will remind myself over and over again that there is a purpose for all that I have chosen to put myself through; there is a higher calling, a bright future, a light at the end of the tunnel that (hopefully) isn’t a train! Because fall will be upon me in a heartbeat and there will be new textbooks to buy (and read) new papers to write, new concepts to grasp and new relationships to forge.

But I can do this. I know I can. I have managed my way through so much “stuff” that surely I will have the strength to endure so that I can look back on all of this “schooling” and find amidst it a host of “wonderful memories” to place in my mental scrapbook of great moments of the past. And, remembering them, I will sigh and say, thankfully, “this too, has past!”