Tomorrow I’ll start meditating regularly. Next week I’ll deal with the anger. Next year, when things settle down, I’ll finally work on my relationship with my father. When work gets less crazy, when the kids get older, when I have a spare hour, when I feel more ready — then I’ll do the interior work I know needs doing.
The trouble is, you think you have time.
This is one of the oldest observations in the contemplative traditions — attributed to the Buddha, and kept alive in every lineage since because it keeps being true in every generation. We are extraordinarily talented at deferring what matters. The urgency of the immediate crowds out the importance of the real. And so it goes: next week, next month, when things calm down.
Things do not calm down. That’s not cynicism — it’s just accurate. Life generates its own complexity at roughly the same rate you clear it. The spare hour has never come for me and probably hasn’t come for you either. And meanwhile, the relationship you needed to repair has gotten more complicated. The habit you intended to break has gotten deeper. The conversation you kept postponing is now a conversation you’ll never have.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes that “life is available only in the present moment.” Not at your destination. Not after the promotion or the resolution or the retirement. Here. Now. This breath. Sharon Salzberg, who co-founded Insight Meditation Society with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, puts it this way: “The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.” Not what we plan to do with it. What we do with it right now.
I wasted years. I’m not going to soften that. I thought I had time to keep drinking, to keep running, to keep performing fine while the interior life quietly collapsed. The third DUI at 25, the drinking until 35 — those are what “I’ll get to it later” looked like for me. The time I thought I had was time I was actually spending.
The practice doesn’t ask you to solve everything at once. It asks for five minutes today. Not because five minutes transforms a life in one session, but because five minutes today is what tomorrow’s ten minutes is built on. The accumulation is everything. And the accumulation can only start right now, because right now is the only time that exists.
The trouble is, you think you have time. You don’t. But you have right now, which turns out to be enough.
