Get Lost in the Moment

The fastest-growing demographic is centenarians. How can you live to be one hundred? Easy. Have good genetics, live a healthy lifestyle, and love others. Loving is the bomb when it comes to living. We like to think genetics are number one, so we can abdicate responsibility for abusing our bodies, since “the die has been cast.” No, it hasn’t.

There’s an x factor, things outside our control that can deliver tragedy for no reason. My first summer share in the Hamptons was with two women—one a mother to infant twins—who died in their early forties from cancer within a year of each other. As we get older, we encounter more x factor, like people dying when they shouldn’t. As a result, we begin adjusting other algorithms.

Tomorrow vs. Today

Stanford professor Walter Mischel studied delayed gratification, offering children a small reward: one marshmallow—or two marshmallows, if they didn’t eat the first one after being left alone with it. The study tracked the kids, and those with the discipline to leave the first marshmallow alone were more successful later in life. Our education system and culture focus on getting kids to be little gratification delayers. Few parents scream at their kids, “I need you to be more in the moment!” But as we get older, and encounter more x factor, we start wondering, “Why am I so fucking stressed today, trying to build a better tomorrow, when I’m equally stressed the next day? When does tomorrow, the reward, become today?”

I’m (desperately) trying to be more in the moment and have found that it’s a real effort. Unless I’m with my kids, who demand that it be all about today … and that’s usually whatever they need or want at that moment. A good thing. Recently a flight I was waiting for to London was delayed, so I started making calls, reading email, doing work. And then I thought … fuck it. I went to duty free and bought a bunch of cured ham (when in Rome). Went to a bar, ordered a pilsner, put on my noise-canceling headphones, and blared Calvin Harris as I ate pork. I. Love. Pork. I could shower in the other white meat.

Super “in the moment,” I headed to the gate, walked through some imposing glass doors, but no gates on the other side, just a baggage carousel. WTF. I had just—somehow—left the terminal and the secure area. There’s a reason you feel recalcitrant walking past the point-of-no-return TSA guy, as—and I can attest to this—they will not let you back in. In an instant, I had missed my plane. Which put me. In. The. Moment.

We’re all seeking that balance … that sweet spot. Delaying gratification, so we can build a better tomorrow for us, our family, and others. You can’t miss too many planes, as people on the other end are counting on you. But there is value to waving your middle finger at the x factor, getting lost in pork, and missing a few.