The other day I was eating by myself at a restaurant and happened to overhear a heart-to-heart conversation between (two people who I assumed to be) a father and his teenage son. The father had (something like) this to say:

Now this is something I got from Buddhism. Bear with me now. A lot of people get caught up in their goals for the future. Now goals are good to have, in so far as they motivate you to action, but the important thing to remember is that we really only exist in the present. So you shouldn’t get so obsessed about the future that you miss out on things in the here-and-now. Take pleasure in the simple act of just being, of being alive, of breathing, walking, talking to friends. Always take in your surroundings and enjoy where you are at this moment. The people who get obsessed with their goals, about the future, and who never seem to focus on the present are the ones who have the hardest time with dying, because they never really lived.

And I thought this was really wise. It’s something that I’ve at least intellectually known for a long while now, although I’m not sure I’ve ever really managed to put it into practice.

Part of it is the career path I chose to take. I’ve been thinking about doing this job since I was old enough to think about jobs. Still, I know for a fact that there’s no such thing as inevitable, that there were plenty of opportunities for me to jump ship and plot another course. But if I look at it from more of an outsider’s perspective, taking into account the family I was born into, the experiences I’ve had, it becomes harder and harder to imagine that it was anything other than inevitable.

The path was long, tiresome, lonely as hell, and at times quite harrowing. And it took a long time. It’s 11 years at the shortest, and for me, it ended up being 13 years, and there were definitely times where if I didn’t hold onto some romanticized notion of the future, I don’t think I would’ve made it.

Which goes back to what that guy was saying about living in the present, and not overvaluing goals.

But how many nights did I study long past the point of exhaustion, thinking to myself that someday things wouldn’t be this bad? How many awful call nights did I think to myself that all I have to do is endure for a few more hours? They can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.

How many times did I manage to slog through the suffocating shittiness of the present, thinking to myself, life will be a lot better once I’m done with all of this, and I can get on with my life?

You know what they say. Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

I’ve known that this was going to happen for a long time, and yet managed to somehow delude myself into thinking that it would turn out otherwise. My life has pretty much shrunk down to work, and then trying to relieve myself from the stress accumulated from work. I have no real social life, I don’t really interact with people outside of my co-workers, my patients, my siblings, my parents. Unless you count social media, which, for these purposes, I don’t really count. I don’t meet new people. It’s always been something I’ve been bad at.

None of these things are going to change until I actually put some effort into trying to make them change.

The thing that I miss the most is free time for creative endeavors. There was a(n infinitesimally short) time in my life when writing was an honest-to-goodness Plan B. If I couldn’t make it into med school, then I’d find some crap job to subsist on, and use the rest of my time to write. I came this close to actually going for it, but then Chance—or Fate (are they really different things?) decided to make things interesting, and just when I had given up all hope, I got into med school.

Shoulda, coulda.

What is gone is gone.

The fact of the matter is that, given I don’t have a social life, and I don’t really interact with other people outside of work, I actually do have free time to try to write.

The problem is that (despite the fact that I’ve grown to despite Yoda and “Star Wars”) you can’t try to write. You have to actually do it.

(And I do realize that I am, after a fashion, writing right now. Although blogging isn’t really the kind of writing I want to do. You take what you can get, I guess.)

In the end, the problem is that I’ve always had a problem with living in the present. It’s something that my closest friends have chided me about repeatedly. I either fantasize absurdly about the future or dwell hopelessly in the past. (The image that suddenly comes to mind is trying to tune into a radio station with an analog tuner, continuously overshooting then undershooting the correct frequency. It’s kind of sad and freaky how obsolete this notion is these days.)

I’m not one for resolutions. I have this pathological antipathy towards self-improvement. But I really have got to learn how to take good advice, and just Be.

(And I find this saying cloyingly saccharine, and yet, it’s true: “Now is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”)