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Mark Twain on Living in The Moment
.."take first rate care of one’s present… leave the future to take care of itself…” Twain wrote in an 1881 letter
The fun of research is the little discoveries you stumble across while looking for something else.
I worked recently on a Medium essay about a painter who earned the admiration of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), a writer best known as Mark Twain.
That essay led me to correspondence between Clemens and another artist, the sculptor Karl Gerhardt. Their letters are among the many posted on the website of the Mark Twain Project, a collaboration of the University of California and the California Digital Library.
In an 1881 letter Clemens addressed both Gerhardt and his wife, Hattie.
Clemens tells them to stop fretting about what might happen with the sculptor’s career and to instead focus on the here and now.
“One can’t forecast his future — it is a mighty sight better to take first rate care of one’s present, & leave the future to take care of itself. It saves [worry. And] it saves more than worry: Every time one wastes a thought on the future he misses a trick in the present,” Clemens wrote.
Good advice, no?
