Rigged in Your Favor

We’re all familiar with the feeling of sadness, though its causes, intensities, and shades can vary from person to person. For many, the worst kind of sadness comes from missing something after it is gone. For me, it’s always been missing things before they are even over. 

I’ve long been obsessed with capturing moments. Scrapbooking and journaling have been a core part of my identity since I was old enough to hold a pencil. My favorite childhood pastime was writing the table of contents for stories. Getting the skeletal structure just right was enough for me to feel a sense of control over the imaginary narrative. Because in the very real narrative of my life, not only could I not predict the next chapter, but I also yearned not to forget the chapter that had just passed. 

I’ve always been acutely aware that I would someday be nostalgic for this exact version of my life. Vaguely, I can feel memories forming in real time, and I have to consciously fight the urge to let that awareness take me out of the present moment. 

Now I feel it constantly at HBS. 

I’ll be sitting in Aldrich 108, or walking across Schwartz at golden hour, or at a dinner in my cozy house that has gone on longer than anyone intended, and a thought will interrupt me: I’m going to miss this. 

This is premature nostalgia, and it sometimes makes me sick. 

Nostalgia is supposed to point backward. Feeling it in the present is unnecessarily melancholy, like prematurely mourning my own life. 

But I’m trying to shift this feeling, since I can’t seem to escape it, no matter how many meditation apps I try, into something that might actually be useful. 

Business school is an unusually future-oriented place. We spend a lot of time talking about what comes next. The next company. The next city. The next round of funding. The next ticketed party. Even our conversations about the present can quickly become conversations about how the present positions us for the future. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But it still gives me the ick. I recognize that ambition requires some amount of forward motion. Most of us came here because we wanted to build toward something (or run away from something). 

But it is easy to become so practiced at anticipation that the present begins to feel like a chore, or a piece of infrastructure. A class becomes something to complete. A semester becomes something to get through. Or worse... a friendship becomes someone you promise to see once recruiting is over.

I refuse to let my EC year become a bridge to the life I imagine beginning afterward. Frankly, the time and money investment to be here is too high. This is the beginning. 

Premature nostalgia has become an antidote to an obsession with what’s next. 

It reminds me that the things I am most likely to miss are rarely the milestones themselves. We have the unusual luxury of being surrounded by smart people who are all trying to figure out what they want the rest of their lives to look like. 

There is a line commonly attributed to Rumi: “Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.” It’s not as simple as blind optimism. It’s more an act of faith. Trusting that the universe is sending you exactly where you’re meant to be, with exactly who you’re meant to be with. Trusting that even a change of direction can become part of a life you are grateful and proud to have lived. 

Maybe that is the lesson I was trying to teach myself as a kid when I wrote table of contents pages for stories I never finished. I wanted to know what every chapter would be called before I had lived it. I’m slowly learning that I don’t need the table of contents in advance. I just want to be awake enough to notice the chapter while I’m in it. 

There is an irony to ambition: we work incredibly hard to create lives we are excited to live, and then risk spending those lives thinking about whatever comes next. 

I am certainly not cured of this. I still make lists. I still plan too far ahead. I still catch myself mentally fast-forwarding. The next version of myself is one I am excited to meet, the same way this current version of myself is one I am fearful to lose. 

So I let the premature nostalgia wash over me. Because it makes me stay a little longer. It makes me say yes more often. It makes me look around. It makes me more grounded. And, more than anything, it makes me more grateful.

Georgia Messinger, originally from Los Angeles, is an EC in the MS/MBA program. She is a foodie, Taurus, startup enthusiast, and firm believer that most things are better after a long walk.