The Next Thing

 We must get on to the next thing.  Right?  The world is noisy and bright and busy, and we must quickly do this so we can then do that.  Oh, and don't forget the other thing we were supposed to do before we can do this.  Such is how we are designed, it would seem, but the programming can easily be executed in a disordered way.  In fact, most of the time, most people do execute the "next thing" program in disordered ways.  Not always willfully and not always noticeably, but there it is.  

Time and tide wait for no man.  Or so proclaims the adage, attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer.  Why do we feel this as an abiding truth?  Perhaps because time has a way of making itself known to us, whether or not we have been formally introduced.  We feel time's pull in ways big and small.  Some of the most common sayings involve this very thing: "Wow, it goes by so fast;"  "Darn, this shift is dragging by;" etcetera, and on.  We feel time and so we react to it in ways sometimes good, but most times not so good.

 Virtually no one escapes the feeling that they ought to be doing something with their time.  This feeling is one hundred percent valid.  Whether believer or atheist/agnostic, people generally believe their life is a gift that should not be squandered.  Saint Francis de Sales warned, "Every moment comes to us pregnant with a command from God, only to pass on and plunge into eternity, there to remain forever what we have made of it."  From this, we can gather that we are supposed to be doing some things, and not really doing some other things.  We even have a certain, unhelpful Capital Vice which famously leads us to avoid what we ought to be doing in favor of... anything else.  For more on the not-so-delightful sin of Sloth, you can revisit this exploration from almost exactly ten years ago.

We moderns find ourselves very busy all the time.  While we are about one task, we are already thinking of the one(s) we have to get to when we're done.  Done?  We never really are done, are we?  Can any of us think of a recent time when we did not feel the pull of the next thing?  We are far too busy to be done.  Modern life has freed people from many of the necessary, but harsh physical labors of the past and replaced them with tenfold more less-harsh labors, most of which could not accurately be described as necessary.  Even so, they exist and they demand we attend to them; and we dutifully comply, often without consciously acknowledging their draining effects. 

We are chasing life, it seems, without really knowing why.  This is certainly relative and not all people chase the same things or in the same way.  Jesus warns us multiple times of the perils of worldly concerns.  An apt example is the parable of the seeds and the different results from their sowing.  He says some people are "...like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful." (Mark 4:18-19)  We have Francis de Sales's pregnant moments coming at us every second of every waking minute.  Are we chasing His commands contained in the wombs of those moments?  Or are we chasing ephemeral tasks dictated by the zeitgeist imposed on us?

The future is something we all see coming, yet never see when it arrives.  This is because that future is completely empty until we fill it.  Our respective futures are basically Schrodinger's Cat; both alive and dead as they race toward us.  A living future is something we can create and which will allow us to blend and thrive with Eternity.  A dead future is also something we can create and will send us into a different kind of eternal blend.  Being slothfully busy seems the clearest path to a dead future.  Even such an acclaimed atheist as Nietzsche seemed to grasp the basics of this concept, even if the deeper meaning may have been lost on him. “Do not be deceived!" Proclaimed Friedrich, "The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.”

In an age of unprecedented ease and comfort, humans in general default to quiddling about; seeming to be very busy, but with things unhelpful to their true well-being.  This brings clear focus on the adage from Proverbs 16:27: "Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece."  Can this be argued?  More "free" time is more time to do... what?  People now chase the next thing with greater urgency than ever, even as the next thing becomes less and less important.  What many people do with their "idle hands" is leading them forward into an increasingly dismal eternity.

Here is a good point to insert one of the wisest sayings of all time:  “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a person considers their thoughts, they are more likely to also consider their actions.  Consideration of thought and action seems to be a scarce happening these days.  We don't really have time for that, do we?  We have so much to do and the next thing is waiting for the thing before it to be done.  Goodness, if people stopped to consider their thoughts and actions, how would all of those next things ever get done?  How, indeed?  Almighty God created man to be anything but idle.  Indeed, we are programmed to do The Next Thing.  The trick seems to be divining what precisely is the correct next thing. 

Human thinkers have always pondered time- for as long as humans were thinking.  The Ancient Greek pagans were certainly deeply thinking about it.  Let's take a quick look at Aristotle's take on past, present, and future:  How "thick" is the present, he wonders?  The present is just a limit between the past and the future.  This leads to a paradox: the past is something that does not exist; it has existed, but does not exist any longer.  The future is something that does not exist; it will exist, but it does not yet exist.  And the present is nothing.  So time seems to be a nothing dividing something non-existent from something non-existent.  That might take a bit to sink in; it certainly did for me.  

I have begun to wonder if the past and future should even be considered parts of "time."  When we think this way, we can begin to appreciate the true value of the "nothing" that is the Now.  That thought surely leads to the notion of how absurd it is to be always chasing the next thing, and of ruminating about the previous things.  The Bible gives us much wisdom regarding time and how to spend it.  Here is a favorite of mine from James, 4:13-17:

"Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. For you are just a vapor that appears for a little while, and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. So for one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin."  

So we will be a vanished "vapor," but we are not yet that.  I'm starting to think we all should spend more of our vapor in discerning not what the next thing should be, but what the Now thing should be.  We cannot escape our programming, but we can fine-tune it.  God built us to do things; and He gave us many tools and examples to figure out what His intent is regarding those things.  We live on at His pleasure and our vaporous lives matter, most especially in the Now. 

The future is a concept we believe in and we are all certain it is coming.  We see it in everything and we pre-live it constantly in our thoughts.  Too often, we reach for it with overeager hands.  Too often, we let it dictate our Now.  C.S. Lewis wisely said, “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”  To me, that means we cannot hasten (or delay) its arrival.  We can, though, use our Now, however thick it may be, to put us in the best possible position to greet the future as it morphs into the Now.

Let's close this out with two more thoughts from the mighty Mr. Emerson:

"To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."

"One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday."  

See ya soon (maybe)!  God bless!

kmg