For reasons best left unknown--ranging from being profoundly personal to "trust me, you wouldn't care"--this has been a long, arduous, challenging week.
One of the many aspects of said seven days was dealing with a TV show we're shooting for the W Network called "Deal With It." Without going into too much detail, the premise of the reality-slash-gameshow is tossing ordinary people into extraordinary situations and capturing via hidden cameras how they, well, deal with it. (Show premieres on May 16, but I digress...)
What I found astounding about just about every one of the contestants is the Clark Kent-ian transformation from run-of-the-mill everyman or everywoman into superhero. Literally living "in the moment" allowed them to handle not just the ridiculous challenges and stunts we put before them, but more importantly, handle the stupefied reactions of their cross-table companion (the show was shot in a series of restaurants in and around the Toronto area).
The point here is that we (okay, "I") don't always live in the moment. Our minds (okay, "my mind") often project, suppose, postulate, wonder, worry and deal with "what will be" more often than "what is." It's the devil's playground of worse-case scenarios, connections of random nothings into predetermined paths, of coincidences into paranoia.
So I know I'm being cryptic, but I often find myself dealing with problems that don't exist anywhere else but the future of my own mind. When the present catches up with the future, most of the time the problem has faded away without ever being concretized into reality.
So, this week's lesson? Until there's a problem, there's no problem. Like the contestants in my show, I gotta start dealing more with "what is" than "what will be."
Because "what will be" is actually more like "what may be"...
...and most likely "what never was."
(P.S. Uh, I'm not devaluing the power of being pro-active; just pointing out the difference between being pro-active and pro-reactive.)
