Futile Future?

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” -John Green (Looking for Alaska)

I’ve wrestled with this quote since I read it. John Green writes great young adult novels about misunderstood nerdy boys chasing after quirky and fascinating girls. Skip “I Love You Beth Cooper” and read his “An Abundance of Katherine’s” instead. In each book he seems to throw me a curve ball. This one still has me a little thrown.

The kicker is that he seems to be advocating doing, not thinking, which I agree with on a basic level. When I think back to the problems I encountered in my quarterlife crisis, I should have been doing more and thinking less. At the time, it seemed impossible to do so. When things fall apart, you yearn for safety and comfort. Venturing out and potentially increasing your pain doesn’t seem like a viable option.

But safe moves lead to dull lives. At a time when the world is open to us all, maybe we need to be thinking less about where we are going and thinking more about where we are. Now is what’s important. Planning for the future is one thing, but if we get to that future by way of a lessened existence, what future is there for us?