We have big­ger houses but smaller fam­i­lies:
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowl­edge but less judge­ments;
more experts but more prob­lems;
more med­i­cines, but less health­i­ness.
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trou­ble cross­ing the street
to meet the new neigh­bour.
We build more com­put­ers
to hold more infor­ma­tion,
to pro­duce more copies than ever,
but we have less com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
We have become long on quan­tity
but short on qual­ity.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow diges­tion;
tall man, but short char­ac­ter;
steep prof­its, but shal­low rela­tion­ships.
It is time when there is much in the win­dow
but noth­ing in the room.

- The Dalai Lama

My writ­ing desk looks out on the street that runs in front of my house. From there, I watch the kids play, the neigh­bors come and go, mow their lawns, hide in their houses. In the sum­mer I can smell freshly-cut grass and meat grilling, I can hear the shouts of games and the high school march­ing band prac­tic­ing early in the morn­ing. I can observe all these things. If I never leave my com­puter, I will never know any of them.

There is such an empha­sis on doing, on accom­plish­ing in the world at the moment. Pro­duc­tiv­ity blogs, to do man­agers, email lists, WIP boards, reminder apps, and scraps of paper tucked in the bath­room mir­ror so that we do not for­get what­ever it is we are sup­posed to be doing. We look for­ward. We look back. It seems like we’re never just where we are.

 I hiked at a nature pre­serve today. As I marched down the trail, I real­ized a was walk­ing quickly as if I were rush­ing to a meet­ing. This has become my nat­ural pace. On top of that, I was quite lit­er­ally lost in thought, miss­ing the beauty around me and dwelling on bills and plans and dead­lines. I was bor­row­ing from the future and toss­ing away the present.

I forced myself to slow down. To breathe. To smell the world, to see the won­der before me, to let the future take care of itself for a while. I stopped, sens­ing my place in the for­est around me. There was a peace there I’d not felt in a long, long time.

Some­times the old cliches say it best: take time to stop and smell the roses. Fos­ter the present. The future will be here soon enough. Deal with it when it gets here.

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.