One Too Many Mornings
some wisdom from Richard Linklater
I'd like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.
— Richard Linklater, Dazed and Confused(1993)
The above quote is one that I feel the need to revisit every now and again. In our busy lives, it becomes almost second nature to look ahead and envision a time in which things will finally be settled down. A time when our real lives finally start.
Once I get my job figured out…once I finally meet someone…once I buy a house. These sentiments only change forms, but I’m not sure they necessarily go away. Life isn’t a series of big, milestones. Life is far more about what happens in between those milestones. It’s is made up of moments like right now, when you think you’re doing nothing. It’s a million pixels — no single one brighter than the others — combining to form the whole image of your life.
I don’t say that in some nihilistic way, nor do I mean to diminish some of the more significant moments(weddings, births, etc).1 Rather, I mean it as a way to try to re-attach meaning to the minor, atomic moments in your life.
Life isn’t waiting for us over the crest of some hill. It’s with us on the walk up. And it’ll be there when we get to the top and realize there’s another hill waiting behind it2.
We all struggle with the feeling of being behind, but it’s well to remember that the present isn’t some insignificant preamble.
Steve' Jobs’s favorite Bob Dylan track was One Too Many Morning. Jobs, infamous for being singularly focused, who most of us would agree seemed to have it all figured out, related most to a song about the feeling of falling behind.
We’re all just trying to figure it out.
If you at all resonate with this you should check out this essay called Real Life. It articulates the point I’m getting at far better than I ever could.
these moments are singular but they echo throughout all the other moments in our lives
Maybe that’s why when people get older they start to say they’re over the hill