Welcome to mindful manager! Today I’ll share with you an important reflection on the importance of reminding ourselves to think about the present, instead of always stressing about the past or the future.
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I hope I'm not scaring anyone with this post, but there will be a last time for everything in life. From the most trivial things (playing a chess match) to the emotionally heaviest ones (seeing a relative or a friend), eventually we're destined to do it for the last time. Depending on your age and lifestyle, for some activities, you may have already reached this point: I probably won't play Nintendo with my primary school friends ever again or do a karate lesson like when I was 10.
Reflecting on our finitude is a serious endeavor. Usually, two types of reactions arise in people when I (rarely) bring up this heavy thought: either they see it as a purely negative mindset, trying to quickly move the conversation to the next topic, or they try to use it to promote constructive reasoning on our daily life and how to make a little step further.
Taking some moments of our days to reflect on the possibility that we're doing certain things for one of the last times has a major benefit in my opinion: it helps us live more in the present, instead of constantly ruminating about the past or the future. And that's one of the most useful habits we can include in our lives, promoted by many different schools of thought (from the Stoics to experienced meditators) for millennia.
There's a famous 2010 study made by two Harvard psychologists that gives some scientific evidence to this. Using a mobile app, they were able to track thousands of testers during their days, asking them in random moments during the day:
What they were doing
Whether they were happy or not
Whether they were thinking about the task at hand or about some future or past event
Results were astonishing: in 47% of the observations, people were not thinking about the present and instead they were "mind-wandering". Moreover, they discovered a strong correlation between being happy and focusing on the task at hand. And even more surprising was seeing that being in the present makes us happier than thinking about positive past or future experiences, and that the activity we're doing has actually little to do with our level of happiness (below 5% correlation to be precise).
If you're into this, there's an amazing article on Wait But Why and an illustrated video by Kurzgesagt (two of the greatest sources of information I've ever found, by the way) that goes much more into the details of everything I said.