The Terror of Now

"Time, time, time, see what's become of me..." The Bangles

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

It seems like everyone’s obsessed with Now. You’ve got your Be Here Now, The Power of Now, mindfulness apps, meditation gurus—basically a full-blown cult dedicated to the almighty present moment. We’re told that if we could just get cozy with Now, life would somehow be this beautiful, Zen-filled utopia where we’d float through the day without a care in the world.

And I get it. I really do. The theory makes sense. Sure, living in the past—hello, regret and nostalgia—usually leaves you feeling like you’re 20 years late to the party. And living in the future? Oh, that’s just anxiety, stress, and a full season of “what-if” reruns.

So, Now should be the logical choice, right? It’s literally the only thing we have. So why does it seem like the hardest place to hang out? If your a self help perfectionist like I am - it is just one more thing to not be doing right. On the other hand, if being in the present is as natural as breathing, we wouldn’t need entire bookshelves of instructional manuals to teach us how to do it.

But here’s the elephant in the room: Now is hard because it’s terrifying. The real reason we avoid it? We don’t trust it. We don’t believe the future will take care of itself, so we cling to the past or try to control what hasn’t happened yet, as if we can outsmart whatever life’s got waiting for us.

Why Can’t I Just Stay in the Now?

There is an irony that when we are in crisis, we are so focused - too present to the moment to be anywhere but here and now. It’s on the days that aren’t disasters in waiting; when I’m not constantly running from crisis to crisis that I find myself struggling to just be in the present. Why is that?

It all comes down to a constant state of hypervigilance—a low-level hum of what if that runs in the background. It’s almost like my brain is trained to stay on edge, like a sentry, waiting for something to go wrong, “Good morning Ma’am, Lieutenant Worry Wart Reporting for duty.”

In my defense, in the past, things often did. One minute everything’s fine, and then suddenly... it’s not. The unexpected phone call. The life-changing news. The mom who was fine and then snapped and got angry for no apparent reason. Those “everything was good until it wasn’t” moments. They stick with you, and soon you start to believe that calm is just a prelude to chaos. If you can’t relax, if Now feels like a radar tower constantly spinning then maybe Eckhart Tolle isn’t living in the same Now as I am. If he was maybe he’d have written Get out Now! (Come on that was funny, right?)

Perhaps a more useful lesson comes from something that Admiral James Stockdale said about his time in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Stockdale noted that the prisoners who focused on hope for the future—those counting down the days until they’d be rescued or released—were often the first to break. The survivors? They were the ones who let go of that future hope. That expected that life would never get better than the hell they were living in. It’s not what you’d expect, (it is called the Stockdale Paradox) after all.

Photo by sheh mi on Unsplash

Why would letting go of hope for the future be the key to survival? It wasn’t about giving up on life—it was about giving up on expecting or needing life to unfold in a certain way to feel okay. Stockdale and the others who survived did so by releasing their attachment to the idea that they had to be rescued soon, or that their suffering had to end, in order to be okay.

Maybe there’s something to that: it’s not about resigning ourselves to the idea that the future won’t get better, but about releasing the need for the bully of external reality to control our inner contentment. If we can do that (big if), we free ourselves to face the present without the crushing weight of unmet expectations. And maybe that’s the real key: living fully in this moment, without hanging all our hope on a future that may or may not unfold the way we expect.

The Trap of Trying to Control What’s Coming

I catch myself doing this all the time—mentally rehearsing every possible future disaster, as if by planning enough, I can prevent anything bad from happening. But the real trap isn’t just the constant attempt to control the future—it’s the fact that I’ve attached my sense of inner peace to those imagined outcomes. It’s like I’ve outsourced my inner okayness to this idea that if I can keep everything from going wrong, then I’ll be okay.

The irony is that until we finally get a Tardis all this future forecasting takes so much more energy than simply being in the present. And yet, Now feels vulnerable, because as long as I’m outsourcing my peace to what may or may not happen, I’m constantly bracing for impact.

The real vulnerability doesn’t come from some looming future boogeyman—it comes from this habit of allowing external reality to dictate my internal state. I’m not just worried about what’s coming, I’m worried about how I’ll feel if things don’t go the way I’ve planned. As long as I’m hanging my contentment on the outcome of things I can’t control, the present will always feel like a shaky place to be.

What if, instead of trying to manipulate the future to secure my peace of mind, I worked on decoupling my inner state from external circumstances? What if I could face the future—whatever it holds—without making my happiness or contentment depend on it? That’s the real challenge: reclaiming my inner stability from the need for the future to cooperate with my plans.

Reclaiming Your Inner Okayness

We often hear the phrase, "Live today as if it were your last." It’s tempting to take that as permission to indulge in irresponsibility, quit work, eat cake for breakfast, and throw all caution to the wind. But maybe that’s not the real message.

Instead, I think it’s more of an invitation to reclaim your inner peace, even without any guarantee that tomorrow will be any better. It’s not about abandoning responsibilities or avoiding the future—it’s about being fully present in this moment, without letting your sense of okayness depend on external circumstances that you can’t control.

If today were truly your last, you’d stop outsourcing your peace to some imagined future outcome because you’d know there is none to hope for. You’d realize that the only thing you really have is this moment. And maybe that’s the point—living as if today were your last is a call to stop waiting for external conditions to line up before you feel content. It’s a reminder that you don’t need to bargain with the future to be okay.

What would happen if we reclaimed that power? If we stopped asking the future to secure our happiness and instead trusted ourselves to handle whatever comes? Maybe, just maybe, we’d find that being present—being truly here—isn’t so scary after all. And that the future, uncertain as it may be, can’t take away the peace we create in the present.*

*The editor of this piece who is also the author of this piece would like all readers to know the author still has no idea how to do this and in fact has based some of her internal peace on whether anyone likes this post…. let’s just say she’s a work in progress.