It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present.
—Alan Watts
It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Previous installments in this series:
- Remembering the Future — Part I: Introduction
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come (cont.)
- Remembering the Future — Part III: The Future is Shaped by the Present
- Remembering the Future — Part III: The Future is Shaped by the Present (cont.)
- Remembering the Future — Part IV: We Can Predict (Some Of) The Future
In this final installment of the series “Remembering the Future,” I’d like to bring the focus back to the present, if for no other reason than the recognition that, much as we care about the future, we only get to live and experience in the present.
It is one thing to pay heed to the future so that we may prepare ourselves as necessary to weather or to benefit from what is likely to come, but another thing to go beyond this point: to waste opportunities to make the most of the present and instead squander precious time and cognitive resources mired in undue anxiety, in making plans for implausible scenarios, or in attempting to control things that—at least to a degree—may be better left to chance and mystery.
Over-planning not only wastes our time in the present, but may also deny us rewarding experiences in the future. This is because we can only plan for what we know or can imagine at a point in time. We can’t plan for opportunities and scenarios we don’t know or can’t predict, and if we fail to leave some room—some gaps and openings in our plans—we may never even know what we might miss. By planning too much and too obsessively, we not only gain a sense of control, but also eliminate possibilities for these unexpected outcomes to occur. To put it bluntly: sometimes the worst outcome of planning is that everything goes exactly according to plan.
As Daniel Pink put it, “Sometimes, the only way to discover who you are or what life you should lead is to do less planning and more living.” Planning is a good way to reduce risk. It may be very useful for such goals as making travel more efficient, avoiding financial destitution, fulfilling job obligations, perhaps pulling off a successful bank heist. But sometimes the greatest rewards we may reap from life—including rewards possibly greater than anything we can even know to plan for—are only achievable by taking risks. This is true in many areas of life, but also—and especially—in pursuing creative work.
In a New York Times opinion piece titled, “Creativity vs. Quants,” Timothy Egan stated this truism, which is also backed by scientific studies of creativity: “An original work, an aha! product or a fresh insight is rarely the result of precise calculation at one end producing genius at the other. You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity.” In other words: some of the conditions for creative achievement are exactly the things we may eliminate by over-planning.
Putting it in practical terms for us photographers: if you plan to head out to photograph some known subject or view in the same way that so many others already have, you are taking the great risk of coming back with yet another—perhaps beautiful or even popular, but decidedly uncreative—cover version. Not only will you miss out on the great rewards of immersing yourself in in a novel experience and engaging your creative faculties, but you will also likely become so focused on your preconceived outcome that you will miss possibilities other than your intended goal without even knowing it.
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Likely, you have heard numerous times, in various turns of phrase, about the benefits of “living in the moment.” As I was writing this essay, I considered about a dozen different quotations I might use to illustrate this idea before finding this one, by one of the greats of our medium, Alfred Stieglitz:
I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
What I love about this passage is that it not only highlights the common wisdom of living in real time, but also alludes to a concept I’ve been practicing and promoting for many years and that has made a profound difference in my own life and work: mindfulness.
Mindfulness, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.”
Relating the idea of mindfulness to Stieglitz’s words above: if utopia is in the moment, but you are not aware of it because you are too preoccupied with things that already happened in the past or that may (or may not) happen in the future, or distracted from aspects your present experience by being too focused on some preconceived plan, then you may fail to be mindful—to notice or to fully appreciate life in all its richness, beauty, and unpredictability, as it happens.
Albert Camus minced no words about what you are actually doing when your worries or plans make you wish for a reality different from the one you are experiencing. “For if there is a sin against life,” he wrote, “it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
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One of the best ways to make yourself more mindful—more aware of your own thoughts, emotions, and experiences as they happen—and at the same time also create something that may be of value (to you and maybe also to others) in the future, is to keep a journal.
When you take time to write even just a brief passage about an experience, in real time or shortly after it occurred, you are putting yourself into a mindful state: you set aside time and cognitive resources—attention—to notice, to focus your thoughts, to make yourself conscious of what you experience and of how you feel about it, what it means to you, how it relates to your state of mind, what implications it may have, and what you will want to remember about it.
Having cameras, including those built into our phones, can be a great way to capture and preserve visual journal notes. But I recommend that you don’t stop there. In fact, I would caution you against substituting the quick and easy act of snapping a picture for the much-more involved and mindful state of thinking about your experience in all its dimensions, articulating it in words, and writing them down.
When you go through the exercise of putting your thoughts and feelings into words, your brain has no choice but to set aside distractions, to prioritize and distill the most important aspects of your experience, to focus on and to consider the things you write about and to sustain this focus beyond a fleeting moment. Beyond just the well-documented benefits of sustained mindfulness, these are also valuable skills that we are all in danger of losing as technology-driven distractions keep demanding more and more of our attention.
Later, in leisure or in less inspired times, you may revisit your journal, recall and relive your experiences, gain perspective into how you have progressed and evolved since these events happened, draw lessons and meanings from them. As Susan Sontag observed, “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”
Of course, there is also the possibility that someone else may discover your journals in some faraway future, and perhaps become inspired by your thoughts and experiences, find useful ideas, and be moved to make positive changes in their own lives.
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There are of course many ways we can live our lives in the present, some more interesting, exciting, meaningful, or consequential than others. Everyone knows this, but how many people actually consider it, and guide their lives according to it rather than proceeding from moment to moment, from task to task, from routine to routine, like so many automatons compelled and controlled from the outside by some clockwork mechanism? How many people truly ask themselves, every single day or even more often than that: How can I use this day, this moment in the most meaningful, satisfying, and interesting way?
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Nietzsche believed that that “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously.” I think this statement deserves some qualification. Living dangerously doesn’t have to mean taking great or frivolous risks; it means taking control of your time, and consciously using it in meaningful ways, even if they may involve some degree of risk and uncertainty. It means, to the degree that it is within your control, not allowing your limited amount of conscious living moments to become wasted, squandered away in uninteresting, unexciting, or meaningless activities just because they are safe and/or easy when better options are open to you, even if difficult or involving some risk or discomfort.
As artists, we are fortunate to always have at our disposal at least one way to use our time in interesting and rewarding ways: we have the ability, the tools, and the skills to create. Robert Henri described what I consider the proper attitude for a creative artist when he wrote, “The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.”
But just picking up a brush or a chisel or a camera and making some aesthetic objects with it, even if they may be pleasing, popular, or profitable, is not guaranteed to give an artist this sense of intense living, fulfillment, or happiness. For that, we must also approach our work consciously and deliberately aiming for these goals: opening the proverbial door for them by allowing for novelty, experimentation, unexpected epiphanies, sincere and genuine emotions. Put another way: we must take our creative work seriously, rather than as just a distraction or a break from other activities. At least in those times when we work for our own edification, we must consciously set aside cynicism, feeling rushed, other people’s demands, judgments, or expectations, and open ourselves up to reverence, awe, new ideas.
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Harry Callahan wrote, “Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.” The word “adventure,” considered properly, means, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks.” In other words, Callahan’s suggestion to consider photography and life as an adventure means exactly as Nietzsche suggested: living—and creating—dangerously.
One way I already mentioned that too many photographers sabotage their odds of having an adventure is by over-planning (i.e., reducing or eliminating potential dangers and unknown risks—the elements of adventure). When you head out with a detailed plan for where, what, when, and how you will photograph, and then execute your plan to perfection, you may end up with a “successful” photograph but you are also depriving yourself of adventure, and with it the possibility of a far richer and more meaningful creative experience.
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The final item on my original list of things to remember about the future, and perhaps the one hardest to put into practice, is this: we have a choice in how we feel about the future.
It might seem that feelings are inevitable responses to certain conditions and experiences, and as such are beyond our ability to control. But this is false. At least to some degree, we do have control over the nature and intensity of our feelings. Anyone who has ever spoken with a therapist likely already knows this. The catch is this: controlling our feelings is not something we can do easily simply by deciding to. It requires effort and training. Sometimes, it requires going against our instincts.
Faced with certain facts or situations, we intuitively make what philosophers refer to as “normative” judgments—judgments of value—such as whether something is good or bad, moral or immoral, better or worse than something else.
We believe falsely that we all know intuitively good from bad, right from wrong—that our default intuitions are always correct, and that there is such a thing as a universal “moral compass” shared by all people, and that always points to some “true north.” But in truth, as Shakespeare put it, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
If we intuitively judge something to be good, we rejoice or feel comforted by it. If we judge it to be bad, we may become angry, anxious, hopeless, aggrieved, maybe even driven to despair by it. But in fact, we can, if we choose, consciously reframe our default judgments and stories. If we take the time to think about our experiences and judgments, we may train ourselves to control our responses, even choose to find positive meaning in things that on first blush may seem discouraging, aggravating, or disappointing.
One way to do this—which I don’t recommend—is to resign ourselves to the idea that the world is meaningless, so we shouldn’t feel too strongly about anything because in the end nothing really matters. This is an attitude known as nihilism, which most people believe unequivocally is a bad thing. As a student of philosophy, I should at least point out to you that nihilism is an entirely rational point of view, and not necessarily a bad one. The problem with nihilism is not that it is inherently bad, but that using it to justify apathy and emotional numbness is not a very satisfying way to go about life. As the writer Charles Bowden reminded us, “Anybody can prove the world’s pointless. But so what? You’re in it.” Which begs the addition: may as well use it in the best and most personally-meaningful way possible.
Even the fact that we are short-lived mortal beings, which many might consider as tragic, can be thought of as profoundly meaningful—even comforting, courage-giving, and life-affirming—if we choose to think about it as such, and to shape our lives accordingly. As Nietzsche put it:
Even if the future gave us no cause for hope—the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time. We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.
I think it goes without saying that if the shortness of life and the privilege of existing in this brief moment in the history of the universe, justifies living according to our own laws and standards, then certainly the same is true for creating our artworks according to our own sensibilities and goals, and not according to anyone else’s rules or expectations.
This is a profound, deep understanding of living in and being aware of our privilege of living in the moment.. of living.. of being aware of living. Existential Joy. Thank you Guy.
Thank you for such a thought provoking series. It merits reading every segment multiple times. The final installment resonates with me on so many levels. Thank you for your gift to all of us.