Sometimes our tendency to live in our imagination diminishes the peace we experience. Our minds stray from the place we are, the people we're with, and the activity we're doing, with the result that we fail to live in the present moment. Researchers at Harvard recently developed a smart phone technology that randomly sampled more than 2,200 people to discover how they were feeling and what they were doing and thinking at any given moment. After analyzing a quarter-million responses from this large sample group, they concluded that people think about what is not happening almost as much as they are thinking about what is happening, and that doing so typically makes them less happy. Translation--a wandering mind adds to our unhappiness rather than to our happiness. Though daydreaming about pleasant subjects made people less unhappy than daydreaming about unpleasant ones, they were not as happy at such times as they were when focusing on what they were doing in the present.
Daniel Gilbert, a professor at Harvard and on of the researchers behind the study, commented on their findings:
"If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery, they typically talk about the things they would do--'I'd go to Italy, I'd buy a boat, I'd lie on the beach'--and they rarely mention the things they would think. But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet."1
I remember an experience I had while traveling in Europe. Fearing that I might never visit again, I spent hours taking photos of everything I saw, trying to record the experience on film. But I spent so much time behind the camera, trying to get the best possible picture, that I began to feel as though I were missing the whole experience. Looking through a tiny lens all day long prevented me from taking in the sounds, sights, and smells of an incredible continent.
Of course there's nothing wrong with daydreaming or with thinking about the future, but if we make a habit of letting our minds live in those places, our thoughts will wander too far from the present, and we will miss the opportunities that God is providing for us to serve and experience him right now. Knowing their tendency to be anxious about what might happen in the future, Jesus advised his followers with these words: "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matthew 6:34). Jesus wasn't urging them to be passive but to pay attention to what was important in the present. Likewise, it is only in the present that we have the opportunity to do God's will, fulfilling his good purpose for our lives.
- John Tierney, "When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays," The New York Times (November 16, 2010) posted on https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16tier.html (accessed October 19, 2020).
