Wish You Were There
A POTENTIAL PITFALL
In these pages, and at Leftfield proper, you’ll encounter the refrain again and again:
Attend to what IS.
Reminder that it is here, in the present, that the rubber meets the road.
And that is always a function of attention. In the past two essays, we’ve looked at how structure provides the conditions under which attention can flourish. How rituals, boundaries and deliberate practice help channel it toward our best ends.
We’ve also seen that this cuts both ways. Because attention measures the degree to which experience is experienced, what ultimately matters is not what we claim to value, appreciate or love, but what receives our attention.
The only avenue by which life is lived.
But to focus exclusively on what IS, of course, omits one all-too-important, all too-human element of experience.
Imagination.
More than merely responding to the world as it is, we can imagine worlds that are not. We can rehearse conversations that have yet to happen. Picture futures that don’t exist. Mentally test-drive ideas without paying their real-world costs.
No evolutionary accident. In fact, arguably, our greatest advantage. The capacity to imagine what isn’t has allowed us to build everything that is. Every bridge, symphony, business, scientific discovery and civilisation itself first existed only in possibility. Imagination, then, is not an escape from reality but one of the primary tools by which we navigate it.
At Leftfield, of course, we program, plan and forecast, but— certainly by contrast to a conventional fitness approach that keeps your eyes on the prize of a utopian future inhabited by your utopian self, we seek neither to dismiss nor dilute this superpower by our blinkered focus on the present, only to discipline it.
And not only because, like any tool, it can be used against us, but because in this instance it so assuredly is. Roads not taken, conversations never had, careers never pursued, bodies never built. An alternative version of life against which the real one is forever found wanting. All upside far outweighed by the down.
And while I’ve long coached the navigation of this predictable obstacle in others, I find I’m only becoming more guilty of it myself. Something, I guess—or imagine— to come courtesy of ever-diminishing capacities, the sure byproduct of age.
As possibility steadily gives way to history, imagination finds itself with ever more raw material from which to construct these comparisons. Advice not to dwell on such things may be well-meaning, but it feels a meagre defence against this tide.
So rather than not looking, let’s take a Leftfield-look and see if we can be a little more precise about what’s happening because the problem isn’t imagination. And seeing so can help swing the odds back in our favour.
Even against the immensity, the indifference, the implacability of time.
Comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy. A thief kept busy throughout human history, and whether you were rocking the finest flint adze or new season sabretooth pelt, some homo habilis would always show up with a better one.
Better horse.
Better thatched hut.
Better sword.
Better mate.
But we humans never learn, and sure enough, our social media-saturated, consumerist society has come to reflect the polar opposite of this wisdom. Most tellingly— as well as fueling this misery— the infinity of the doom scroll is the reductio ad absurdum that proves the folly.
There is now literally no end to the Joneses. And they are all younger, better looking, and wealthier than you. Better house. Better car. And having a much better holiday.
So you can stop playing that game.
But of course, we need no Jones at all for this trick and will cast this same envious Eye of Sauron on ourselves. And be just as miserable for it. Somewhere in the background on a parallel track, that version of you that didn’t take that job, or did. That stayed, or left. That started earlier, trained harder, chose differently.
You might not know them better than you know yourself, but you like them better. The one without the hangup, the injury or the heartbreak. The one without so many miles on the clock.
Haunted by your ghost self.
The good news is, that stick you are beating yourself with is just as imaginary. Because insofar as any counterfactual could ever exist— and absent a quantum physics explanation, we don’t have time for — that particular counterfactual could not.
Sometimes the ghost lives on Instagram. Sometimes it lives twenty years ago. Sometimes in the body you used to inhabit. It’s always the same ghost.
And it’s always constructed in the same impossible fashion. As one who got to choose and preserve all options. All your ambitions and none of the constraints. One who navigated every fork in the road while never paying the toll.
This is not a might-have-been or spying some greener grass, and the idea of genuine possibility does no harm, but what we’re imagining is the impossible.
At least for us.
Again, without getting into the nuts and bolts— or quarks and quanta. In quantum mechanics, a wave function exists in superposition — pure undifferentiated potential — until it collapses into a single actuality.
A collapse mirrored at our human scale. We think of potential as though it were some ever-diminishing resource — a leaking reservoir— when it is just as available to you from one moment to the next. A set of possibilities available before the next action. An action that will revise those possibilities again.
So every choice is an act of exclusion. Every ‘yes’ contains a multitude of nos. Attention is simply this process made continuous. To attend is to select. To select is to exclude. To exclude is to define. We might consider this narrowing a negative, but if our progress comes from opening doors, then meaning comes from closing them.
Marriage. Career. Children. Friendship. All determined by what they are not. Are any of these made better by keeping your options open?
Evolution works the same way. Selection, not accumulation. Fitness, not fullness.
Our biological trajectory trends in one direction, and a fitness practice isn't an attempt to reverse it—not one driven by a sense of lack or the delusion of resurrection.
A practice — in the Leftfield fit for purpose sense — is that continuous contact with the present. Not a destination. Not an identity. Not a before-and-after, just an ongoing appointment with yourself that aims to preserve, for as long as possible, the conditions under which that self retains agency.
So your choices aren’t made for you.
But importantly, rational though this is, there is nothing cold about it. Firstly, you should feel what choosing costs— that too is its value. And this is not to argue against regret nor aspiration— both instructive— only the unhelpful, needless suffering.
Emotional regulation is useful, of course, but save it for the real world. Your ghost self is no more real than a Ringwraith. One of them is much better at ruining your life.
At the very least, you might conjure up some costs for that other self. If it’ll make you feel better— and because it’s imaginary— go ahead and saddle that poor fool with some hefty ones.
Or forget that foray into fantasy and focus instead on what is.
Reality contains genuine possibilities. Those deserve your attention. Because The Boss was wrong, your glory days don’t pass you by; you’re living them. And one day, you’ll look back and wonder at the vim and vigour you presently enjoy.
Youth is wasted on the young. And you’ll never be younger.
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI