I saw a city in the clouds.
Luke: I saw…I saw a city in the clouds.
Yoda: Mmm. Friends you have there.
Luke: They were in pain.
Yoda: It is the future you see.
Luke: Future? Will they die?
Yoda: Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.
Luke: I’ve got to go to them.
Yoda: Decide you must how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could. But you would destroy all for which they have fought and suffered.
Yoda said it is difficult to see the future. Of course, that is quite true. The reason why the future is so hard to see is because it doesn’t exist in reality. The future exists only in our minds. It is a figment of our imagination, an idea that is no more real than the monster-crammed nightmares of our childhood.
But we live as though the future is real. That is understandable—our experience has shown us that we will more than likely be around later today to meet with friends after work or hang out with them after school. When we were kids and our parents told us, “Tomorrow we’re going to Disneyland!” we began to anticipate the future and our minds left the here and now to board the nonstop monorail to the happiest place on earth. Our bodies were still in suburbia, but our minds were skipping merrily through the fantasyland of the future.
Over time we’ve developed a habit of playing with the future. We make tomorrow’s plans, then we remake them, then we confirm them, then we go over them again, and again, and then we check them a dozen more times. We think about them so much we start to dream them. You know the feeling? It’s like when you have a big test or job interview coming up and you think about it constantly, working out every detail and reexamining every possible answer you might give. Such thinking can become consuming, even maddening. Witness what Luke tells Yoda about his foresight of Han and Leia being tortured: “I can’t keep the vision out of my head!”
Is this the best way for us to handle the future? Is obsessing about tomorrow beneficial? Well, no. But stopping our future musings is easier said than done. I mentioned that we have a habit of casting ourselves in the future. It’s more than a habit. It’s really a blind compulsion—something we do almost as naturally as breathing, but aren’t aware of it.
Please don’t misunderstand; making plans for tomorrow is not a bad thing. In fact it can be very important. But the consideration of the future that I am talking about here is that which occupies our attention unnecessarily, that draws us into anxiety, fear, and so much doubt that we loose the life that is here now. Life can only be lived in the present, if we become swept away by our thoughts of the future (or our memories of the past) we are not really living.
Just before Luke leaves to "rescue" Han and Leia (funny how Chewbacca is never mentioned) Yoda tells him that if he honors what his friends fight for then he will stay on Dagobah and not go to them. Yoda is asking Luke to honor what is real, not what he imagines. He is asking him to honor this moment and not the amorphous ideas of his head. To truly live we have to honor what is real. This moment is real.
I don’t wish to debate the merits of Luke’s actions. Hindsight is twenty/twenty and whether it would have been better for him to go his friends or leave them to rot is not my concern here. What I am trying to point out, and what I think Yoda is also trying to convey, is how to best handle the future. Put simply: The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present.
When we develop our capacity to be here now, to give our full attention to this moment, we make ourselves available to life as it is. We do not struggle with the way things are or become consumed by dissatisfaction, frustration, sadness or even boredom. We allow life to unfold naturally and without resistance. The future is then unmasked and is no longer an object of fear or anxiety. It is no longer an object of anticipation and craving either. It is just what it is in reality, an idea.
To take care of the present we need to keep bringing our attention back to this moment. Again and again and again, come back to what you are doing now. You may be reading some laser-brained blog, you may be eating, standing, walking, brushing your teeth, sitting on the toilet—whatever it is you are doing that is your life. Be there for it, honor it and it will serve you and the future quite well.
