Back to the Future
On the Compulsion to Be Somewhere Else
📣 Happy Friday. I hope this week treated you well. A few quick announcements before today’s essay.
First, I’m co-leading a men’s retreat with Alex Olshonsky and Jeff Greenberg at Akera in the Catskills—Thursday evening, June 4th through Sunday morning, June 7th. We’ve assembled a powerful group of high agency men, including founders, creatives, and spaceholders. A few spots remain. Hit reply to this email or message me here if you’d like more information.
Second, I made some fun updates to my website, including an expanded bookshelf now with over 90 books across a dozen categories, and a Wall of Love featuring testimonials from past and current clients. If you find yourself there, say hi.
The world is a shitshow right now. Our family needs multiple go bags if god forbid something happens.
This thought, unprovoked and uninvited, floats into my awareness not even a minute after settling onto my meditation cushion.
Back to the breath.
Daniel. Shit. I still haven’t responded to his text from two days ago. I have to get back to him today.
I smile. Back to the breath.
What’s the weather in North Carolina next week? I need to start packing. I hope it’s warm.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
I wonder what Holly is going to tell me when we hang on Sunday. I know I pissed her off last month. What am I going to say when…
Thinking. Planning. There it is again.
This back and forth persisted for an hour. Stretches of breath, stillness and quiet, but then, out of nowhere, the future creeps back in. Again. And again. By the time I opened my eyes I’d mentally rescheduled two clients, responded to a text, rehearsed a difficult conversation, planned for a catastrophe that hasn’t happened, and checked the forecast in Stone Ridge, New York City, and Asheville.
Leaning over and blowing out the candle in the mantle in front of me, I realized I’d just spent an hour in relationship with a bunch of things that don’t exist.
—
I rise from my cushion and turn around when Florence, my three year old, appears at the base of the stairs. One look and I know. She is sick. Oh shit.
She lumbers to the couch and curls up like a tired cat. Belly down, cheek pressed into the cushion, blanket pulled up. Her favorite stuffie clutched to her chest, thumb in her mouth, switching to the other, back again.
I glance down at her, say to myself poor thing, and then my mind automatically kicks into planning mode.
I scramble to the dining room table, reach for my phone, pull up my calendar, and shout for Eliza in the kitchen.
I spiral. My day is packed. How the hell am I going to pull this off? What does the rest of this week look like? Which clients can be shifted? What does Eliza’s schedule look like?
I am now triaging a day that has barely started, already canceling meetings in my head, solving for variables based on incomplete information, while Florence lies on the couch needing exactly one thing: her father to be with her.
After ten minutes of coordination with Eliza, I walk back into the living room and gently sit beside Florence, trying not to disturb her. I put my hand on her head, look down, and take her in—her droopy sick eyes, the slow blink, the sound of her thumb sucking, the hopelessness of a child who just feels awful.
When I finally arrive, my thoughts dissolve. My body softens. It is just her and me, together in this moment.
I am flooded with love, connection, the urge to comfort this tiny sick human. And underneath it, something rises from the depths of my stomach, heavy and familiar. Guilt. For the first twenty minutes of her sick day, while she lay there needing her dad, I had been somewhere else entirely, racing ahead, solving for a future that hadn’t arrived yet.
It was the same pattern I experienced on the cushion, this unconscious pull to dwell on what might come, to solve for the future. And I started seeing it everywhere. In the kitchen making breakfast. Chasing the girls in the backyard after school. Running on the trail. Behind the wheel. At my desk between sessions. Even sitting across from a client, supposed to be fully present, worrying about where I needed to be next or what I had to fix.
I could no longer unsee this pattern, not just in myself but in my wife, my family, my friends, and my clients. We are always one disruption or thought away from leaving what’s actually here.
—
We’ve been scanning the future since before we had language for it. This is one of the great features of human consciousness. Our brains can simulate what hasn’t happened yet: anticipating threats, solving problems before they arrive, and planning for what’s ahead. When something disrupts the plan, the emotional brain fires before the thinking mind can catch up: fix it, solve it, get ahead of it, make it stop.
The question isn’t whether the reflex is useful. Sometimes it is. The question is whether it takes over before we’ve even looked at what’s actually in front of us.
The future feels controllable because it’s still malleable: you can envision it, shape it, adjust it, prepare for it. The present just is. You can only meet it exactly as it’s unfolding, and that’s uncomfortable for most of us. Planning is how we escape the present. When what’s in front of us feels uncertain or just too much, we withdraw and go somewhere we feel more in control.
The future becomes a refuge from uncertainty and discomfort. And when something unexpected happens, the reflex is immediate: solve it now, even when now isn’t necessary.
This is a familiar and particular reflex: to respond, protect, and solve the instant something unexpected disrupts the plan. It’s the nervous system responding to a perceived threat before the present moment has even been fully assessed and met.
In those first moments with Florence, I didn’t know how sick she was or what the day would require. But before I’d even looked at her—really looked at her—I was already somewhere else. Pacing between the kitchen and living room, eyes glued to my phone, mentally inventorying every client. When did we last meet? What are they facing? Which sessions can move? I was relaying options to Eliza as she checked her calendar and relayed back her availability.
Underneath all of it was a fear I couldn’t quite name in the moment: I couldn’t let my clients down. What would they think if I canceled? Would they still trust me? Would they see me as unreliable? So I was deep in relationship with imagined versions of each of them, their potential disappointment and possible frustration, while my daughter lay on the couch, right in front of me.
Whether I sorted this out at 7am or 8:30am, it wouldn’t have mattered. The clients could wait a few hours. Florence couldn’t. But that’s the nature of deep conditioning—by the time the mind catches up, the body is already ten steps ahead.
Sometimes we plan to escape discomfort. But sometimes, like that morning, we plan because we think we have to when in fact, we don’t.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa had a word for this—shenpa. The urge to scratch. We reach for the future the same way we reach for anything: to avoid the raw, unmediated experience of what’s right here. Planning feels productive and relieving. Being here feels exposed.
Does it always have to be now? Most of the time, no. If it’s not now, something else is. And that morning, it was caring for Florence.
—
Back at the dining room table that morning, checking my calendar and mentally rescheduling clients while Florence lay on the couch, I wasn’t just physically and emotionally checked out. I was somewhere else entirely, fully absorbed in a projection of a day that hadn’t happened yet. Florence was right there and I was relating to a ghost.
When I’m in an unconscious relationship with the future, there’s often a particular quality I can feel in my body: tightness, contraction, collapsing, grasping. Driven by the need to control what hasn’t happened yet and avoid the discomfort in the moment. It crowds out everything else. The present vanishes. We’re consumed by a simulation our minds have constructed.
This is what the future actually is when we live there compulsively. It’s not a place, but a relationship with a figment of our imagination: a fear, a story we’re telling ourselves about tomorrow, next week, or next year might require. And like any relationship, it consumes our attention, devours our emotional bandwidth, and influences how we move through our days.
Real relationship can only happen in the present because that’s where everything actually is. Florence’s sick eyes, her slow blink, the particular way she switches thumbs. None of that exists next Tuesday. Neither does the temperature of the room, the weight of the blanket, the sound of the house settling in the morning quiet. It’s all right here, right now, asking to be met.
When we’re in relationship with the present, we can come into contact with so much more than we realize: the people we love, the texture of our clothes, the beating of our own heart, the way light comes through the window at dawn, the look from our partner when we greet them in the morning. All of it alive. All of it available. All of it only here. This is life as relationship.
The future isn’t just where we escape to. It’s what pulls us away from being in relationship with what’s actually here.
—
One morning this week, as I was leaving the gym, I received a frantic 5 minute audio message from a client in crisis. On the drive home, I began thinking of their situation, rehearsing my response, and mentally creating space for them in my calendar.
I parked, stepped out of the car, and walked into…
The fullness of spring. Seventy degrees. Blue sky, radiant sun. The warmth on my face. Robins and blue jays calling from the birch and maple trees ahead, their branches just beginning to bud. The sound of the creek running alongside the building. The smell of the magnolias. Cars whooshing past on the road behind me.
The strange thing is, this moment felt familiar but forgotten. Not this particular parking lot. I’m there most days. But this openness. This groundedness. This sense of being back in my body. This field of relationship available in every direction—the sun, the air, the birds, the ground under my feet, the whole world showing up for contact at once.
Of course. It was always here. It always is.
This is the practice of returning. Over and over, for the rest of your life.
I’m still learning this. Some mornings the cushion is full of go bags and weather forecasts and conversations that haven’t happened yet. Some days I don’t return until I’m halfway through dinner. But I’m catching it sooner and seeing it more clearly. And every time I come back, there it is. That familiar openness. That field. That intimacy. That sense of arriving somewhere I somehow already knew.
And what’s here, when I arrive, is never nothing. It’s everything that actually matters—and it’s only available now. Florence on the couch, asking to be comforted. The client who needs my presence, not just the slot on my calendar. Eliza’s face in the morning when I greet her after a hard night. The creek I’ve walked past a hundred times without hearing.
When the future pulls us away, it takes the fullness of what is right in front of us.
And when I catch myself leaving, there’s one question that brings me back: does this really need my attention right now? Most of the time, no. And that question, asked honestly, is often enough.