Are You Living in The Land of Later?

Do you ever find yourself thinking things like…

• I will start that project once I have enough money/time
• I’ll start exercising after the weekend
• I will commit to my meditation/yoga practice fully as soon as I’m feeling better
• I will start painting daily when I have a larger studio space
• I will work on growing my business as soon as I move to that new location
• I will start eating healthy as soon as the holidays are over
• I will [insert something you will start doing as soon as XYZ is in place]

If your nodding your head at the computer screen, then welcome, because like me, you may be spending a lot of your time living in The Land of Later.

The Land of Later is an ambiguous landscaped place where your ideals/plans/best intentions often get washed up on the shores of inaction. It’s a place that looks a lot like life, but may not leave you feeling very alive.

Over the weekend I had an epiphany about Living in the Land of Later:

I was kayaking on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park with my husband. Evening was falling. The sun was descending towards the horizon and beginning to paint the mountains as giant silhouettes, casting them in deep purples and blues smattered by the lightness of leftover snow. We paddled around a bend of the river to a scene gushing with a moving, flowing beauty and yet still, in it’s calm command of itself.

Here the river slowed and widened. An Audubon’s worth of birds were hanging out on an island of earth and grass: Cormorants with their wings spread wide to dry. Geese, singing and squawking. Ducks meandering mud and padding through the ripples. On the other side of the island, four Trumpeter Swans glided side by side through the water. As we slid our kayaks quietly past, the swans startled and in a symphony of great white wings, the four birds lifted into the air, framed by the mountains and touched by the dying, golden light.

I was in deep awe, as if a single, high and moving musical note had echoed through my body, quieting the whole of me. The Land of Later (and it’s corresponding chorus of thoughts) dissolved and my skin tingled. I felt light, content and inspired.

As if I’d paddled into a new realm of myself, I had a moment of knowing that this is what it’s like to feel fully alive, to be truly here and breathing in the container of the present.

For this slight shadow of time, I’d emerged from The Land of Later and it came to me that

I don’t have to wait for the perfect conditions to start fully living. I can start living right here, right now.

And you know what? So can you. 

working at it every minute of every day,