Last update: 30 March, 2015
If you've recently walked into a bookstore or passed a shop window, you may have realized that self-help books are very popular. Most of these publications are very critical of modern values consumer society, to which it seems that we have all been educated: commit to studying to get a good job, to earn more money, to be able to live as you want, to buy the house of your dreams ... Even to be able to afford a nice funeral, as they are more and more expensive. In short: we must always act thinking of the "us" of the future.
To counter this view, most self-help books report a great truth: time does not stop and, if we do like the horse chasing the carrot that is hung in front of his eyes without looking around, life will pass and we will not even realize it. On the contrary, the real revolution that we are called to carry out is that of grasping the moment we are living in, valuing its importance. In a certain sense, it means returning to that "carpe diem" of the past, albeit with different nuances.
At that time the value of the present was emphasized because there were not many hopes to place in the future. You had to enjoy every moment, because the next day it could happen to meet an enemy in the woods and your life was over, or to anger someone more powerful than you and come to a bad end. Western religion also viewed this life as a vale of tears that preceded salvation.
Today everything is different, we live much longer and mortality has decreased. But what terrifies us is precisely there speed of time passing: far too fast to allow us to realize all the dreams we would like. To make them happen, we need just that: more time available or, in its economic translation, more money.
Precisely for this there is no time to waste. We have to work hard and live for a present that we pay for with what we are most afraid to spend: time. Being able to evaluate how much a dream is worth, what we will get from its achievement and, therefore, how much time of our life it is good to invest in it requires an intelligence that has little to do with that which allows us to solve mathematical problems, discover the meaning of a word or juggle games of logic. Rather, it is an intelligence that has to do with our innermost being.
Getting something we crave so much can fill us with excitement, but it can also require us to agree to do a job we don't like, and that makes every day heavy. These kinds of dreams are very expensive and, if we give up halfway, no one will give us back what we have lost along the way. Because of this, using the intelligence of life, it is good to understand that many times it is better, for our own happiness, to choose dreams or desires that allow us to also enjoy the journey or dreams that require certain sacrifices and efforts, but not for too long.
Finally, if this article has left you with a bitter aftertaste, we would like to tell you that happiness is not something rational: you cannot understand or live away from feelings and magic. However, it is always possible to use rationality to decide which goals deserve an investment of our time, along which paths we are most likely to find happiness, and in which places the most intense emotions await us.. There are few sensations comparable to the sense of fullness that produces the awareness of the fact that, even as the years pass, we have exploited every second of our time: be it the present or the future.
Image courtesy of Petar Paunchev
