Translator: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I met up with a friend, recently,
who was feeling somewhat stressed, tired and despondent.
"I'm three days behind on my life,"
she told me.
"What does that mean?" I asked her.
"I need three more days," she said, "three clear days to catch up with myself,
but the problem is I can't find those three days."
"I know that feeling," I told her.
"No, no, no, you don't understand."
She said, "At the start of the year,
I was already three days behind on my life.
(Laughter)
Now, fast forward 10 months,
I'm still three days behind on my life.
I've had 287 days to find these three days,
and I haven't been able to."
"I really know that feeling," I told her.
"No, no, no," she said, "you really don't understand.
I've always been three days behind in my life.
It's not just this year, it was last year and the year before that
and all through my 40s
and all through my 30s."
And as I was listening to my friend,
I had this epiphany;
like a whopping epiphany,
like a proper bona fide epiphany,
one of those epiphanies that I don't normally have.
And this is what I said to her:
"Maybe you were born three days too late."
(Laughter)
"Maybe," she said,
"but it's not much of a solution, is it, Robert?"
(Laughter)
"No," I said.
So, I was my mother and father's firstborn child,
and my mother's labor was the shortest in history at that hospital -
for which she has thanked me many times over the years -
and it's just a theory,
but I think I was born with fast genes.
Right from the beginning,
I had this desperate urge to get going:
maximum haste,
full speed ahead,
a racing mind chasing something just out there in front of me.
So as I continued to talk with my friend,
I introduced her to the topic of Destination Addiction.
"Destination Addiction" is a term I coined a few years back
to describe a compulsive behavior
fueled by an erroneous belief
that happiness is somewhere else,
over there, at the next stop in your life.
And here's what I've learned about that.
Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else,
you'll never really be happy where you are.
Now, you know when you're suffering from Destination Addiction
because you tell yourself and everybody else
that you're "getting there."
"How's it going?" your friends ask.
"I'm getting there," you tell them.
"Well done," they say.
(Laughter)
They don't ask you which there or where there is.
They just tell you you're doing very, very well.
And that seems to be the way of things with Destination Addiction.
So you're always looking for happiness over there:
success is at the end of the rainbow,
enlightenment is in the next meditation,
and heaven is in the hereafter.
And as a result, we are psychologically absent
because we're not here;
we're always preoccupied with getting through the day
rather than actually being in the day,
and we're constantly striving, but we're never arriving.
And most of all, we never get to tell our friends, "I've got there."
With Destination Addiction, you're always fast-forwarding;
you live your life fast, but are you living it well?
Sociologists would tell us that we have speeded up our lives.
We're doing everything faster than ever before.
We're living in a manic society
in which the pursuit of happiness has speeded up,
and yet the faster we chase happiness,
the longer the chase seems to be.
We're doing business at the speed of thought, so to speak,
and yet we have no time to stop and think about what our real work is
and what our true purpose is.
We're so busy chasing success
that we rarely have enough time to enjoy our lives,
and we're looking for love in all the wrong places.
In the manic society, we're a little bit like the white rabbit,
the white rabbit that's late, very late,
for an important fate:
a date with destiny.
The philosopher Rollo May said,
"It is an ironic habit of human beings
to run faster when they're lost."
With Destination Addiction, you're living in the not-now.
Ever since the beginning of time,
the philosophers, the sages,
the priests, the ministers, the mystics, the poets
have all told us that now is our best chance for happiness.
They've all encouraged us to seize this day,
to embrace this moment, and to be here now.
And for the most part, we completely and utterly agree with them.
We really do plan to live in the now very soon.
(Laughter)
We really are going to live in the now once we've got there.
The thing is we're just waiting for a better now.
You see, we can't help but feel
that our now isn't quite as interesting as Eckhart Tolle's now,
(Laughter)
or that our now isn't quite as spiritual as the Dalai Lama's now,
or that our now isn't as exciting as Lady Gaga's now.
So we're waiting, just a little bit,
to see if there might be a better now that might come along.
With Destination Addiction,
we turn now into a stepping stone to get to somewhere else.
Every now becomes a passing moment,
and if we're not careful, you know, our life's going to pass us by.
With Destination Addiction, we're always running on empty.
We're always in sacrifice,
we're always really trading in
here for there, this for that, now for what's next,
and we are absolutely focused in on that next,
to the point that even when we go on a holiday,
we're thinking about the next holiday.
Everything's about what's coming next.
In our career path, it's about the next promotion,
or it's the next job,
or it's about the next milestone,
the next achievement, the next book, the next album -
whatever it is, it's always something next,
the next zip code, perhaps.
And we're so focused on this next,
that all the while, as I say, our life is passing us by.
And we promise ourselves that next year is going to be different,
but it isn't,
because Destination Addiction really is an addiction,
and all the while,
we're like this rolling stone that can't find its satisfaction.
We are, if you like, missing out on the joy of slow.
There's no slow,
you know, the time just to be able to take that time truly,
to enjoy the life as it's actually happening.
And as a result, it's all chronos and not kairos.
There's no eternal moment for us to enjoy, and we're running out of time.
It's all so non-stop;
it's also repetitive and compulsive.
And yet we must stop. Why?
Because if we don't stop, we're never going to get there.
There are two types of stopping:
there's voluntary stopping and involuntary stopping.
A good example of voluntary stopping is what Siddhartha did.
Siddhartha had been chasing enlightenment for many, many years.
He had walked the path of austerity,
of sacrifice and of suffering and of searching,
and after a while, he just stopped.
He stopped under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya,
on a place that became known as the immovable spot,
and here, having given up the chase,
having let go of the search,
he found the enlightenment that he was looking for.
That's a really enlightened way to do it; that's a voluntary stop.
An involuntary stop - that's something else.
That's usually down to a life event.
That's something often to do with some sort of a health episode,
maybe like a broken toe or a migraine, or maybe even a slipped disc.
A slipped disc was what happened to me a few years back.
It started as a light pain, just here in the base of my spine.
But of course, I didn't stop; I just kept going.
And that light pain then turned into an ache
and, eventually, something like a bee sting.
But I still didn't stop,
and I still didn't make an appointment with the doctor.
I just kept going until I came to an absolute halt.
My back jammed, and I literally wasn't able to move,
and actually, for the next three months or so,
I wasn't even able to walk up the stairs in my own home.
So I really couldn't go anywhere, and I really couldn't do anything.
After about three months,
I was issued with a walking stick - which was a great thing -
and over the next few weeks, I learned to walk again,
and I think, I also learned to live again.
It was in that time
that I asked a friend to design for me my watch,
and this watch looks like any other sort of a watch, really,
except if you saw it more closely, you'd see instead of it saying
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all the way around to 12,
It just says now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now,
all the way around to now.
And right there in the middle, it says happiness.
In those six months or so, I found my three days,
the three days that I thought I was always behind on in my life too.
And I found them right there.
Like the prodigal son,
I think we all have to return to now
if we really are going to live a life that we truly love.
We have to be willing to give now another chance.
A successful life can only ever be the one we're living now.
We can have all of the great dreams and the beautiful futures
and everything like that
waiting there for us in our mind,
but this is it.
This is where it's happening.
So a happy life also can only ever be the one that we're living now.
Our job, I believe, is to be able to give now another chance
and to see that somehow now is an invitation
to give up the search for happiness.
One of the spiritual practices that really saved my life, I think,
was that I started to ask myself
how I could cultivate a more lovely relationship with now.
And I would ask myself that question over and over again:
How could I have a more lovely relationship with now today?
How could I somehow give now even more of a chance?
And I found as I gave now more of a chance,
it did become more interesting,
it did become more spiritual,
and it also became a lot more exciting along the way.
So it turns out, I think,
that the real destination of our life isn't about getting there,
it's about being here.
And as for the future,
I think we'll enjoy it fully
because we decided to be here first
and to be here now.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)