The truth is, most of us have a pretty adversarial relationship to time.

Our lives are pervaded with addictions and distractions. 

I was talking with a friend who very often doesn’t feel he has a clear direction in life, doesn’t operate on any solid principles, and usually doesn’t feel he’s clear on what he should be doing at any given moment.

I completely relate to this difficulty: it’s the uncertainty of what you should be doing at this moment, or today, or in life. We feel this uncertainty all the time as stress, anxiety, fear — or simply the feeling that we’re doing things wrong.

So I’d like to share how I’m working with this uncertainty… a small number of ideas I learned from Zen and from playing the game of Go.

Mindfulness has (amazingly, wonderfully) become quite a buzzword in the last decade or so, and for good reason. It’s powerful, and can help us to become more present, happier, more focused, and much more.

However, if you’re new to mindfulness, it’s easy to get the wrong idea from all the marketing you’ll find online. Images of people at complete peace with the world and themselves, full of bliss, simply by sitting still and meditating for a few minutes … they are beautiful images, but they don’t tell the whole truth.

Mindfulness is powerful, and you should absolutely do it. But you should do it with your eyes wide open, knowing what’s up.

So here’s my attempt at an honest guide to mindfulness.

Most people feel busy and distracted throughout the day — calm and focus and a feeling of purpose are fairly rare for most of us.

We’re jumping from messages to social media to email to quick work tasks to a search for something we’re curious about, from dozens of messages to dozens of posts to a couple doze browser tabs. All day long, one quick thing to the next, putting off anything that requires much more focus than that.

The term “monkey mind” captures this fairly well — our minds swinging from one branch to the next, jumping around without pause. It’s not quite accurate. Monkeys rests a lot of the time, and it’s apes that swing from branches, not monkeys, but the image is vivid enough.

This is actually how our minds are much of the time, but it can feel stressful and unfocused. Many of us would like a calmer, more focused way of being, at least some of the time.

How do we develop this kind of focused mind, able to come to rest?

If we’re absolutely honest with ourselves, most of us are only half-committed to most things — in many cases, much less than half-committed.

We say that we’re going to change our diet, but are we fully committed? Do we make a meal plan and buy the groceries and clear out the junk food and set time in our calendar to prep meals for the week and change our habit of eating out much of the time?

Do we feel so committed in our hearts that we’d bet our lives on it?

Let’s imagine that you’re a reasonably healthy adult with all of your basic needs met, people who care about you in your life, and things you enjoy doing available to you… you should be pretty happy, right?

It turns out, even in this incredibly lucky scenario, most of us still struggle — stress, anxiety, frustration, overwhelm, letting ourselves and others down, disappointment, hurt feelings, anger, feeling like you’re always behind… it all creates a sense of unease that is not aligned with our fortunate circumstances.

So how do we go about enjoying life, finding a sense of peace and calm and purposeful focus?

What big task, project, chore, conversation have you been avoiding facing?

It’s one of the biggest problems in many people’s lives — procrastination is one word for it, but I’ve found that “avoiding” is more accurate. We have something we don’t want to tackle or face, and so we keep ourselves busy and distracted so we can avoid it.

Avoidance, of course, leads to a host of problem. But most problem would be best address by getting good at facing and diving into what we’re avoiding.

The amount of time we spend fretting over what path to take, when we’re feeling uncertain, can sometimes be staggering.

We’re entering into unknown territory, and we don’t know how to proceed. It happens all the time for many of us: we start a new job, launch a new venture, change careers, have to deal with incredible change, decide to write a book or create something online, put ourselves in a new social situation.

Some of the things we do in response to this uncertainty:

- Extensive research, often to the point of very diminishing returns, sometimes to the point of being overwhelmed by how much information we’ve found.

- Buy books, courses, programs, other materials that we think will guide us — this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but in truth, none of this will give us certainty.

- Try to find teachers or other people who will guide us, who have been there before — again, hoping that they’ll give us certainty, but often this isn’t a magic pill either.

- Delay making a decision, putting it off over and over because it’s too hard to decide. Avoid, avoid. This might be the most common option, actually.

- Give up because you don’t know if you can do it, don’t know what to do, don’t know what the hell you’re doing. This is pretty common too — in fact, most people give up before they even start.

These are very common reactions to entering into uncertainty, but usually not very helpful. They get in the way of doing the work and living the life we’d like.

So how do we deal with the uncertain path that we’d like to embark upon?

It’s not always easy, but I’ve found there to be a set of practices that can help tremendously.

I spoke with someone who so beautifully explained their biggest problem that I had to stop and catch my breath.

It spoke to the human condition incredibly well.

Some of the things they mentioned:

One of my favorite parts of what they said is:

“So I guess, my biggest goal is to live without a general sense of fearfulness and terror, or panic, as if I have a pack of wolves on my heels, or I’m trapped in some weird escape room where I have to make the right choice – and no choice seems right.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

Let’s talk about those wolves on your heels.