Most of Which Never Happened

The saying is attributed variously to Churchill, James A. Garfield, or Mark Twain: ‘I am an old man and I have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.’ Thought to derive from serious words by Martin Farquhar Tupper in 1839, and mythologised only later, somewhere down the decades it turned into a comic trope. Indeed, every time I think of it I smile. Its comedy comes from its subversion: it plays on, and upends, the mind’s capacity for prediction. We think the line is going somewhere grave and wise, and then it slaps us briskly round the chops, in a manner that is definitely not grave but which might nonetheless be quite wise.

I have been re-reading Mark Williams’ and Danny Penman’s 2023 book Deeper Mindfulness, a follow-up to the best-selling Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. The focus of their book is ‘feeling tone’, or in Buddhist psychology, ‘vedana’ – the subtle flavour that discerns experience as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – and how the mind reacts to this by predicting what will happen next. In the same way that when hearing ‘The Houses of P-‘ in a conversation about politics, we automatically think ‘Parliament’ before it’s even said, so too the mind fills in the gaps of what’s to come in each moment from its ‘cache’. Much of our day-to-day experience, Williams and Penman suggest, is made up of these micro-predictions on autopilot; we might check in with real-life experience only when it catches our predicting mind by surprise. In this way, mental scripts fuelled by vedana wind up writing the story of our lives – ‘predictive processing’ – before we have had the chance to live them.

This is an enormously efficient way of navigating the world, and it might sound like it would be fantastic if the story is particularly exhilarating or upbeat. But for good evolutionary reasons, the mind’s reaction to vedana is typically stress-based. We don't like our unpleasant feeling tones, we crave more of the pleasant ones, and the neutral merely make us bored. So our predictive scripts tend to wind up replicating some version of how what's present is wrong. 

This is even before we account for the fact that our ‘cache’ comprises standout experiences – and what stands out is typically any stress response. In everyday life we might remember not the warmth of the conversation we had this morning, but the way our colleague’s facial expression fell when we said that one thing; further back, childhood experiences of powerlessness, neglect or fear may inscribe not only the words but also the very genre of the scripts that emerge in later life.

These scripts can lead us to a place where their predictions seem, for whatever reason, to be unliveable. We find ourselves stuck, stymied; we cannot carry on under the burden of this contents page, but we don’t know how to undo its machinations in real time. It is in these moments, Williams and Penman suggest, that mindfulness of the present – attending to experience as it is right now – refreshes the mind’s cache. It begins to reveal moments of mismatch between the predictive script we tell, and the actual life we are living. In so doing, it illuminates exactly how the predictive script has been generating. We can see the past more clearly, and new possibilities for our future emerge that, until now, well-worn grooves in the mind have obscured. So Churchill, James A. Garfield, or Mark Twain – whoever it was – was onto something: as the internal mechanics of the bubble become clear in real time, the bubble bursts. 

If these ideas are catching you in the midst of a cynical predictive process, you might raise an eyebrow. In a self-managerial age, aren’t we often exhorted to examine our own patterns, disrupt their self-defeating projections, and do better? We scrape ourselves or others raw with the ferocity of our critique. But Williams and Penman invite a different relationship with our evolution-honed, survival-based mind. When, they counsel, you notice that it has wandered into fearful stories about the present, predictions of the future, or extrapolations from the past, don’t rush to ‘correct’ it. Instead, take a moment to appreciate this capacity of mind, perhaps even to wonder at its emergence from the deep; how the will to protect ourselves from harm and draw ourselves towards goodness is the most fundamental property of being alive.

After a decade of teaching mindfulness, this sounds familiar to me, as it may to you. But my recent adventures in cosmology make it land anew. There is something about an immensity of context, the vastness of the universe in which life on our planet found its way, that renders real-time discerning of our survival-based minds like the discovery of something extraordinary. That we exist at all is a silent story written over millennia, one as beautiful as any we could imagine for ourselves. 

I am reminded again of Matt Haig’s Midnight Library multiverse, and its precondition that is life itself. When Nora Seed returns to the library for the last time, the clock is finally tolling and the books are beginning to burn. ‘This library isn’t falling down because it wants to kill you,’ says the librarian, as the ceiling crashes upon their heads. ‘It’s falling down because it is giving you a chance to return. Something decisive has finally happened. You have decided you want to be alive. Now go on, live, while you still have the chance.’

We must hold, then, several truths in the same hand: that our will to survive will cause us all kinds of troubles, most of which never happen; and that it is an immensity as big as the deep time of evolution, the deep space of far-off realms. If, while the library is falling down around our heads, we can only remember that we are jumping out of our skins because we so dearly want to be here, we might just spot that a different future for ourselves is possible. Breathe in new air, and begin a new chapter.