It is not good to look forward to something

It is not good to look forward to something

22. August 1926, Nadroni Listy

Did you ever notice that we seem to do nothing else but spend our lives in expectation and that we cannot live without looking forward to something? In winter we are looking forward to spring, and we imagine the beauty of warm evenings and the splendor of the summer sun at the waterside. In summer we make plans for a skip trip, imagine with secret joy a warm stove, a floor lamp and a beloved book, think of winter wonders in the snow and the charm of a grey, clouded sky. We are looking forward to a dress we will get, a concert we will attend, a city we will visit, and a reunion that is lying ahead of us. When I was a little girl I was wildly looking forward to - “life”. I expected that suddenly, unexpectedly, abruptly life would begin. A curtain would open and life would come. Nothing came and many things came, but not the right things, somehow it was not life, I did not even realize that I was not a little girl anymore but still looking forward to life, still waiting for it.  Yet, it had been life long since, even back then, when was little and looking forward to it. Things and events that I had been looking forward to were passing by, one by one, and were far from being as beautiful as the pleasure to look forward to them and just became beautiful again in remembrance and in looking forward again to their repetition.

Sometimes it seem to me we are living at the edge of a hole into which our present is falling. We are cognizant about the past and superfluously concern ourselves with it without being able to change it, and we know the future and superfluously concern ourselves with it, without being able to guess or control it. The only thing we know nothing about is the present, this afternoon, this hour. We watch over the past like a treasure and calculate the future, but hopelessly waste the present. It barely reaches our conscience that the present, and present alone, is the life. We cook tea and think it is only a interlude between something that has been and something that will be. However that is not the case, but this is life. Life is nothing else. It is inglorious, ordinary, and full of disappointments, that is to say, it is one big disappointment, it is like sitting for ages in a waiting room, waiting for a train which never comes. Yet, the clearing in the forest with heath, sand and sparse pines through whose crowns the sun is shining is wonderfully beautiful, stupid heart, don’t think of a man, who loves you too little or too much, don’t think about a new coat with used lining, and about the necessity to write to the tax office, just think about what you see. Solely and entirely thing about this, grasp it entirely, forget about everything else, be neither sad nor happy, neither cheerful nor wistful, that’s all nonsense, be in the present and be able, by God, be able to just see this hour and savour all it entails. Be able to tear the chain of fear, insecurity, pain, discontent, and longing. Simply be. No one will replace what escapes you right now, but about the pains of today you will laugh tomorrow. You have never experienced something that you did not see in a different light tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow in yet another light again, you can rely on it: what appears to be dead serious is not. If you take your sorrows so seriously it is because you carelessly forget the present hour, which alone is dead serious,  irrevocable, and irreplaceable for you life.