“Que sera, sera,” an old song reminds us: “Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.”
Set in the key of A major and sung with full-throated gusto by Doris Day, that tune from Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) rose to no. 2 on the Billboard 100 chart, and in October 1956 it made Your Hit Parade, where Giselle MacKenzie belted it out with operatic, over-the-top bravado. That such a song became popular during the Cold War era was, I suspect, more than an ironic coincidence. Fallout shelters were in vogue. Schoolchildren were being taught how to take cover under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Consciously or otherwise, Americans were deeply apprehensive, and with good reason. Que Sera, Sera addressed—or masked—a widespread fear of the future.
In his books and talks, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) also addressed that fear. But what he offered was not a cheerful fatalism but an engaged realism grounded in Zen practice. “The best way to take care of the future,” he often advised, “is to take care of the present moment.” To my ear, at least, that pronouncement has the ring of truth. As a proposition, however, it prompts two general questions. How, exactly, does one “take care of the present moment”? And why is taking care of the present moment the best way to “take care of the future”?
For Thich Nhat Hanh, taking care of the present moment entailed two interrelated forms of meditative practice. The first, known as samatha (“calm abiding”), is essentially concentrative meditation. Practitioners assume a seated, upright posture and pay sustained attention to a particular object. Novice practitioners usually begin by focusing on their breath. They may also focus on a phrase, a meditative verse, a mantra, a visual image, or a sound. Skillfully practiced, samatha calms the body and stills the mind, while also creating a stable mental platform for a second stage of meditation.
Known in the West as Vipassana (“looking with insight”), this second stage expands the scope, depth, and long-term impact of concentrative meditation. Once a degree of stability has been established, practitioners closely observe, in real time, the bodily sensations they are experiencing and the ideational phenomena—the thoughts, images, judgments, and memories—passing through their minds. As they become more experienced in the practice, they may undertake to examine the “roots and fruits”—the emotional subtexts and probable consequences—of what they are feeling and observing, as for example the fear underlying compulsive planning. Over time, advanced practitioners of Vipassana gain insight into their mental and emotional patterns—their fixed ideas, their habits of thought and feeling, their conditioned reactions–and the effects of those patterns on their daily lives, their natural environment, and other people.
Such, in brief, is the practice of “taking care of the present moment,” a practice popularly known as “mindfulness.” But in what specific ways, we might ask, does this practice enable us to “take care” of the future?
To begin with, mindfulness practice anchors us in things as they are. A potent antidote to delusive thinking, the practice unveils the discrepancies between our ideas, attitudes, and beliefs and what is actually the case. Hidden feelings become apparent, as do fallacious views. Beyond that, the practice puts us in touch, through felt experience, with the realities of impermanence and interdependence—realities that our culture’s expectations of permanence and its ethos of individualism tend to obscure. By so doing, mindfulness practice provides a solid foundation for whatever choices and decisions we may be compelled to make in the future.
Second, daily meditative practice increases our capacity for what one tenth-century Chan master called an “appropriate response.” Truth to tell, many of us react to unexpected situations in ways more habitual than thoughtful, more compulsive than wise or compassionate. Meditative practice trains us to pause and respond rather than impulsively react, and to do so in ways appropriate to the occasion. As meditative practice deepens our inner awareness, so does it heighten our social awareness, enabling us to know what (if anything) to say, to whom to say it, and how to say it, without causing unnecessary harm—or escalating a dangerous situation. Ideally, the practice also enhances our ability to speak and act in ways that reflect our deepest moral, social, and spiritual values, whatever those may be.
“The future,” Thich Nhat Hanh remarks in his book You Are Here, “is being made of out of the present . . . We can only take care of our future by taking care of the present moment, because the future is made out of only one substance: the present.” Whatever will be, will be, but we are not without agency in the matter. Stewards of the present moment, we are also stewards of the future.
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