Kai Krause, well-known software entrepreneur and father of innovative user interface concepts, wrote an interesting article for this year's Edge Annual Question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?".

His thesis: "Zen is wrong!". Although I would like to add an "enjoy the moment as well" to his conclusions, I think Kai is pretty right on the spot with this. Here is a (slightly edited) excerpt of his article:

Zen is wrong. Then is right.

"Zen is wrong. Then is right. Everything is not about the now, as in the 'here and how', the 'living for the moment'. On the contrary: I believe everything is about the before then and the back then. It is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not about the moment itself.

In German there is a beautiful little word for it: 'Vorfreude'. It still is a shade different from 'delight' or 'pleasure' or even 'anticipation'. It is the 'pre-delight', the 'before-joy', or as a little linguistic concoction: the 'forefun'; in a single word trying to express the relationship of time: the pleasure of waiting for the moment to arrive, the can't-wait-moments of elation, of hoping for some thing, some one, some event to happen.

Whether it's on a small scale like that special taste of your favorite food, waiting to see a loved one, that one moment in a piece of music, a sequence in a movie.... or the larger versions like the expectation of a beautiful vacation, the birth of your baby...
We have been told by wise men, by Dalais and Maharishis, that it is supposedly all about those moments themselves, to cherish the second it happens and never mind the continuance of time...

But for me, since early childhood days, I realized somehow: the beauty lies in the time before, the hope for, the waiting for, the imaginary picture painted in perfection of that instant in time. And then, once it passes, in the blink of an eye, it will be the memory which really stays with you, the reflection, the remembrance of that time. Cherish the thought..., remember how....

Nothing ever is as beautiful as its abstraction through the rose-colored glasses of anticipation... The toddler's hope for Santa Claus on Christmas eve turns out to be a fat guy with a fashion issue. Waiting for the first kiss can give you waves of emotional shivers up your spine, but when it then actually happens, it's a bunch of molecules colliding, a bit of a mess, really. It is not the real moment that matters. In anticipation, the moment will be glorified by innocence, not knowing yet. In remembrance, the moment will be sanctified by memory filters, not knowing any more.

In the Zen version, trying to uphold 'the beauty of the moment in that very moment' is in my eyes a sad undertaking. Not so much because it couldn't be done... surely it can: all manner of techniques have been put forth on 'how to be a happy human' by mastering the art of that. But it also implies, by definition, that all those other moments live just as much, magnified under that spotlight: the mundane, the lame, the gross, and worse: the everyday routines of dealing with life's mere mechanics. One inevitably is forced to uphold the un-beauty of the majority of moments.

In the Then version, it is quite the opposite: the long phases before and after are what counts. They last hundreds or thousands of times longer than the moment itself, and done properly, they will drown out the everyday humdrum to a minimum.

Bluntly put: spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realized, dreams not come true.... Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you purposely create. And at the same time, relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them.

In other words, the Executive Summary: Make plans and take pictures!"

Kai Krause, 2005