Modern mindfulness meditation is helpful in a great variety of ways. Most importantly, it trains you to notice when your mind is distracted. Once you’ve done it for a while, the benefits go further. Especially, you can notice how your mind is distracted.

Some of Andy Puddicombe’s more advanced Headspace meditation series ask you to notice the kinds of distractions your mind faces: starting with whether it’s a thought or a feeling, and then examining the kind of thought or feeling it is. Once you’ve done this enough, you start to notice patterns: what it is that your mind tends to do in the moment. In my case, I noticed that my mind returns over and over to future plans.

We need future plans, of course. If you don’t make them at all, you’re never going to be able to get a job or find a relationship, let alone succeed at any such goals. Planning for the future is an essential part of any life. And yet planning for the future can easily become compulsive.

I think compulsive planning can be a particular feature of anxiety, which I’m prone to. (A former therapist diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder.) Anxiety is a response to uncertainty; the more certain you are about a situation, the less likely you are to be anxious about it. Planning can help you feel more certain about a situation. And yet, of course, it doesn’t actually make things certain, as astute proverbs are likely to remind us. A Prussian military commander noted that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy; before that, a great Scottish poet told us “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley”.

But the problem with always planning for the future isn’t just that it doesn’t work as well as we hope. Even more so, it’s that it stops you from appreciating the present. After all, that future you’re planning for will itself become nothing but a series of present moments: if you can’t enjoy those future present moments when they happen, it brings into question why you were even bothering to plan for them in the first place.

I’ve started to notice the point especially while eating alone. I love the pleasures of good food, and I’ll often get myself something delicious but unhealthy – say a buffalo calzone (one of the underappreciated gems of Northeastern US cuisine), or a fancy chocolate bar. And while I eat it, I’ll notice my mind drifting to thoughts about pieces I might write or to political situations I’m upset about.

And that is a missed opportunity! Pleasure itself is a lot more intense if you can actually focus on it. So I’ve been trying to learn to eat more mindfully – to focus on the pleasure of the food itself in the present moment, not to look ahead. That’s not the kind of mindfulness advocated in classical Buddhist texts – but that’s fine. I am Buddhist but not only Buddhist. Those texts have a single-mindedness I reject: I do think the joys of this world, whether sensual pleasures or familial love, are worth pursuing. We just need to be careful about getting attached to them, craving them – yet attention to the present moment can help with that too.

Nor is attention to the present moment just a Buddhist thing. In Faust, Goethe says: “So the spirit does not look either forward or backward; the present alone is our happiness.” (Nun schaut der Geist nicht vorwärts, nicht zurück, die Gegenwart allein ist unser Glück.) Pierre Hadot, the famous French scholar of ancient philosophy (and teacher of Michel Foucault), takes Goethe’s quote as deeply helpful for understanding the Hellenistic philosophers: the Stoics and especially the Epicureans. It is within each present moment that our pain or joy or tranquility happens.

And yet, too often, we find ourselves drawn out of a potentially joyful moment by too much focus on other times. And I think that’s something our culture encourages. Fleetwood Mac’s old anthem tells us not to stop thinking about tomorrow, because “yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.” The point of the latter part is true enough: focusing on the past is an even bigger problem than focusing on the future. At least the future is something we have some power to change, whereas nothing we can do will affect the past. But it’s noteworthy that the song doesn’t even consider the option of thinking about the present!

For me, in the past few years, I’ve found it surprisingly helpful to focus my mind on the mantra: Here I am, in this very moment. I found that particularly helpful several years ago when I was in a toxic work environment. It was far too easy to focus my entire attention on the unjust things my supervisor would say and do, at a time when I had not yet found a way to leave the job. Yet I came to realize that, while they regularly left me anxious because I could never be sure of what indignity would come next, those injustices were not actually affecting me in most of the daily moments of the job: answering emails, walking up the stairs to my office. I could tolerate the situation much better focusing on the present moment and leaving the past and future behind. I’m now finally in that future where I’ve moved to a better job, but the mantra has continued to help me. It helps a great deal to remind myself “Here I am, in this very moment” – whether I’m assuaging anxiety about the future by turning myself back to the mundane crowd on the subway, or keeping my mind on the delicious thing I’m eating.