By David Hegg

I think it was around my 40th year that I realized how much time I’d spent living in the future. Much of my life was filled with tasks and goals deemed valuable only because they prepared me for whatever came next. I remember receiving a basketball for Christmas in third grade and practicing so I could get picked for an intramural team. Then, I set my sights on making the junior high team, then the high school team, and so on. I worked hard to get into college, only to learn college grades were about getting into the right grad school, which would prepare me for the next step in life. This future-focused mindset bled into every area of my life.

As a married couple, we rented an apartment to save for a small house. When we finally bought one, we looked into how to “move up” to a larger house later. Even raising children had this sense of always needing to anticipate the future: Should we buy her 12-month clothes, or the 18-month size she’ll grow into soon? When she crawled,........

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