Don’t forget about everything before you finally

Oliver Burkeman has this concept of a “when-I-finally” mindset which describes “the sense that real fulfillment, or even real life itself, hasn’t quite arrived yet so that the present experience is merely something to get through, en route to something better.”

To paint a more eloquent picture of just how silly this mindset is, Burkeman also shares the following quote from John Maynard, who would suggest that such a person “does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on and forward forever to the end of cat-dom.”

What a tragedy it would indeed be for this person to never manage to love his own cat all the while.

There’s nothing wrong with looking forward to when something finally happens — when a project finally gets wrapped up, when a difficult problem finally goes away, or when the next holiday finally comes around.

But don’t fall into the trap of only looking forward to these future events. Learn to savor, too, the time that precedes these moments — the swaths of precious life that, whether you manage to pay attention to them or not, are going to pass by.