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Rather than waiting for a much-anticipated event or activity to unspool in real time, we often enjoy it before we actually experience it. By bringing to mind pleasantly edited images of the activity we are yet to experience, we preview it favorably, pre-sampling the joys the activity is expected to bring us.
“I’m looking forward to it!” This is the well-worn expression used to describe our mental musings about a hope-filled, unexperienced future, musings that sprinkle a savory seasoning over our current moment, enriching it.
The Very Mortal ‘Now Moment’
Our moments are always fleeting “passing” ones. But despite their brief mortality, the powerful pleasure hormone, dopamine, surges to its highest levels in those pivotal moments of anticipation when a longed-for future experience is expected to bring us big rewards.
It’s in the absence of the actual experience that we fire up the engine of joyful anticipation, causing it to roar. Indeed, the most rewarding part of our longed-for experience often comes in a version birthed in our imagination, its anticipated form. Here, a well-orchestrated effort takes place among the shared neurocircuitries of the prefrontal cortex or the executive brain and the endogenous reward system—”the organs of anticipation.”
Such positively charged anticipations saturate our now moment with a mentally pre-lived, optimized future of our own making, our own design. These fantasized versions of reality then grant our every wish indiscriminately. This can drive our motivation even overcome any future obstacles.
And when the future does arrive, we feel we’re on familiar soil, more at home, because we are primed and ready to respond in accordance with our prior, positive anticipations. We are therefore predisposed to interpret or shape the meanings of the realities about to unfold before us.
Imagined Joys vs. Real Ones
Ironically, there are times we find less joy, even disappointment, in our activities when they are actually lived than when they were merely anticipated or pre-experienced imaginatively. Greater enjoyment came during those coveted moments when longing for the activity heavily invested it with anticipatory excitement and hopefulness.
Moreover, our positive anticipations often set a high standard unmatched by our actual experience.
Pre-Editing Our Future Experiences
Our optimistic expectations pre-edit our future activities, crafting them into their ideal form, thus foreclosing upon their real-life downside. Inconveniences, discomforts, and miscellaneous encumbrances typically crop up as we navigate the complicated realities that regularly accompany our actual life experiences.
What often plays out in real life as lackluster, or little more than ordinary experience, was extraordinary as we imagined how it might be when we pre-lived it idyllically. Our optimistic now moment nourished us in a manner that actual experience didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t.
The Conventional Now Moment
The conventional now moment accessed or achieved by mindfulness and meditation promises us science-supported, across-the-board health benefits, stretching broadly from enhanced immune function to heart and brain health. A recent Harvard study found evidence of significant increases in gray matter density and improved cognitive function in those who practiced just eight to 10 minutes of daily mindfulness meditation.
Mindfulness helps fasten us to a now moment emptied of unsettling, stress-inducing contaminants, the psychological debris of past worries and future apprehensions. Freed of these, we inhabit a serene, peaceful moment of tranquility unleashed from self-recrimination, judgmentalism, and other non-acceptance.
Meditation Essential Reads
We find an “anchor,” typically in focused breathing, that tunes us exquisitely to the sensations arising from within ourselves which imparts a healthy detachment from extraneous, outside preoccupations, thus conferring profound feelings of well-being.
Because of these wide-ranging benefits, mindfulness meditation should take its rightful, secured and well-practiced place within our repertoire of daily self-care habits.
A Caveat: An Omnipresent Now
Three months prior to Albert Einstein’s death, he received a letter from a recently deceased friend’s widow. In her letter, the widow made a reference to their past friendship to which Einstein responded with this cryptic, mind-boggling comment, “…the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Unfortunately, Einstein himself deceased shortly after making his provocative statement and was not able to fully explain what he had meant. But if Einstein was right, as he often was, maybe our past, present, and future moments are indistinguishable, the sheer artifact of our brain’s delimited, perceptual apparatus.
Perhaps our now moments can never be fully purged of the influences of our past, present, or future because they are all the same moment. As per Einstein’s postulations, maybe we inhabit an omnipresent moment, one that has no beginning or end.
What are your now moments like? What would you like them to be?
