The smell of industrial lavender in the corridor of St. Jude’s is thick enough to chew, a synthetic floral blanket draped over the sharper, underlying scents of antiseptic and slow decline. Fatima S.-J. is currently ignoring it, her focus narrowed to the 46 strings of her concert harp. She is in Room 306, a space where the air feels heavy, almost viscous. She plucks the C string. It’s flat. It’s always flat in this humidity. She turns the tuning key with a precision that borders on the obsessive, her calloused fingertips a testament to 26 years of coaxing vibration out of wood and wire. There is a patient in the bed-a man whose breathing sounds like dry leaves skittering across pavement-but Fatima isn’t looking at him yet. She is waiting for the instrument to settle into its own skin. The moment is, frankly, agonizing. It is boring, it is humid, and it smells like a chemical garden.

The Tyranny of the Now

I was thinking about Fatima’s patience this morning while I stared, horrified, at my own reflection on a laptop screen. I had joined a video call 6 minutes early, unaware that my camera was already active. There I was: slumped, unwashed, and currently engaged in a very thorough, very unconscious investigation of a blemish on my jawline. The realization that I was being seen-even if only by the recording software for a few empty seconds-sent a jolt of pure adrenaline through my chest. I wasn’t ‘present’ in that moment; I was a casualty of it. We are constantly told to live in the ‘now,’ to embrace the present as if it were a precious gift. But most ‘nows’ are actually quite terrible. They are filled with awkward Zoom realizations, the smell of hospital lavender, or the mundane weight of 1996 memories we can’t quite shake.

We’ve turned mindfulness into a weaponized form of compliance. If you aren’t happy in the current moment, the logic goes, it is because you aren’t paying enough attention. […] To tell someone in the final 116 hours of their life to ‘be here now’ is not a gift; it is a cruel joke. What they want-what we all actually want-is the ‘not-yet.’ We want the next song, the next visit, the tomorrow that hasn’t been tarnished by the current pain.

The Escape Artist Melody

Fatima understands this better than most. She doesn’t play songs about the present. She plays music that suggests a movement toward something else. The harp is an instrument of anticipation; every note decays into the next, creating a bridge of sound that leads the listener away from their immediate surroundings. She told me once, over a $6 cup of lukewarm cafeteria coffee, that she sees herself as a getaway driver. She isn’t there to help people sit with their suffering; she is there to help them escape it through the narrow door of a melody.

The Mind’s Time Travel

I often find myself disagreeing with the modern prophets of ‘presence.’ They suggest that if we just looked at a raisin for 26 minutes, we would find God. I’ve tried it. All I found was a shriveled grape and a growing sense of resentment for the time I was losing. The human mind is a time-traveling machine. It is designed to simulate 16 different futures before we even finish our morning toast. To force it to stay in the narrow slit of the present is to clip its wings. We are at our best when we are dreaming of the 106 things we want to do next summer, or when we are reminiscing about that summer in 1976 when everything felt possible.

The Synthesis of Now and Next

I think back to my Zoom call disaster. The shame I felt was entirely based on the present moment-the raw, unedited ‘now.’ But as soon as I started thinking about how I would tell the story later, the shame began to evaporate. By turning the moment into a future anecdote, I was reclaiming it. I was moving through the ‘now’ to get to the ‘then.’

We are constantly told that multitasking is a sin against focus, but I think the ability to be in the ‘now’ while planning the ‘next’ is our greatest superpower. It is how we survive the 56-hour work week or the 16-minute wait for a delayed train. We aren’t really there; we are already halfway to where we are going.

The Resilience of Forward Motion

If we look at the data-and I mean real data, not the 6-step lists you find on productivity blogs-we see that people with high levels of ‘future-mindedness’ are generally more resilient. They can endure a painful ‘now’ because they have a vivid ‘next.’ They have 106 reasons to keep going, even when the current 6 reasons are failing them. This is the contrarian truth: the more we obsess over the present, the more fragile we become. We become like a string tuned too tight, snapped by the first change in humidity. We need the slack of the future. We need the ability to say, ‘This moment sucks, but the next one might not.’

The Exit and The Future

Fatima packs up her harp after 36 minutes of playing. She moves with a quiet efficiency, her movements practiced over 16 years of hospital shifts. She doesn’t ask the man how he feels. She doesn’t ask him to ‘stay in the moment.’ She simply nods to the empty space above his head and leaves the room. As she walks down the hall, she’s already thinking about her next appointment, the 6-string guitar she wants to learn to play, and the dinner she’s going to eat when she gets home. She is living in the ‘not-yet,’ and that is exactly why she is able to bring so much beauty into the ‘now.’

The Biology of Becoming

We aren’t meant to be still. We are built of 46 chromosomes that are constantly replicating, a biological engine that is always moving toward the next version of itself. To be ‘present’ is to fight against our very nature. So, give yourself permission to look away. Give yourself permission to plan, to dream, and to fix the things that aren’t right yet. Whether it’s the tuning of a harp or the way you see yourself in the future, the work we do for the ‘not-yet’ is the only work that truly matters.

Moving On

Fatima steps out into the 86-degree heat of the parking lot. She winces, the sun hitting her eyes after the dim fluorescent light of the ward. But she doesn’t stop to ‘be’ in the heat. She unlocks her car, a silver sedan from 2006, and starts the engine. She’s already moving. She’s already gone.

And in the room she left behind, the man is still breathing, his mind perhaps finally wandering through a 1986 memory of a beach where the ‘now’ was exactly where he wanted to be, only because he knew there was a ‘tomorrow’ waiting for him on the shore.