Cafe Girl Chronicles

If you live a life in the future perfect, it makes the present tense – Café Girl

 Living in the present takes practice.  It’s not always easy to be conscious of the present moment in my daily life let alone in a romantic relationship that is just picking up steam.  Let’s face it, who doesn’t have expectations?  You’d have to be a highly evolved Buddhist monk or an accomplished ascetic to achieve this state.

Forget the “c” word (commitment), it’s the “e” word (expectations) that’s the problem.  We’re conditioned by popular culture to have expectations…unless of course you’re my bag lady.  Movies, music, countless magazines, and books, they all tell us how it’s supposed to be.  They sow the weeds of discontent which we must remember to pluck from our garden if it is to thrive.  Charles Dickens wasn’t the only one to have Great Expectations.  We all do.

Over the years and with lots of practice, my expectations of people have become less and less.  I would like to say that they’ve become non-existent but that’s just not true. I haven’t achieved that level of detachment so I’m not quite ready for the monastery yet.  However I have gotten much better at managing my expectations.

They’ve been scaled back from a vision of happily ever complete with his and her towels to daydreaming about a romantic weekend getaway next month.  And when I can manage them down to the present moment, I will have achieved nirvana.  But until then…

I often think of that scene in the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary where Bridget fast forwards from the present moment of racy emails with the office scoundrel directly to her wedding reception in the blink of an eye.   Mustn’t read too much into it she thinks to herself.   How many times I have projected myself in the future? I don’t even want to think about it.  Eish!

 Time travel isn’t the stuff of science fiction it’s the stuff of every day life, it is such stuff as dreams are made on.  The future perfect is perhaps built on tantalizing glimpses of the possibilities sometimes given intentionally – sometimes not.  Regardless it’s our propensity to project with even the slightest bit of encouragement that unfortunately affects our here and now.  So what happens when the future doesn’t unfold like I have led myself to believe? It becomes the present tense.

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