Living in the Now: Planting the Right Seeds

The bad news is that you are in a free-fall and you do not have a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground.”

(This is the second part of my explorations with free-fall. The last article discuss about the fluidity of the groundless )

Some remain captive to past traumas, while others — like many of us — live in perpetual preparation for imagined futures. We become planners, strategists, and worriers, constantly adjusting our present actions to avoid potential pitfalls ahead.

The past, with its accumulated wounds, triumphs, and lessons, often functions as more than memory — it becomes a template, a prediction engine for what might come. But this approach fundamentally misunderstands time. The past is a sunk cost, a story already written. The future is a story not yet written and unforeseeable. It offers no guarantees about tomorrow and too often distorts our experience of today. We have traded the vibrant, immediate experience of free-fall for the illusion of control — essentially strapping ourselves to jetpacks we want to but cannot pilot rather than embracing the natural flight of the present moment.

When we recognize the perpetual free-fall nature of existence, the present moment opens like a vast sky, not as a brief interval between meaningful events, but as the only reality we ever truly inhabit. Then the question arises: how then should we live? Here, the metaphor of planting seeds offers profound guidance.

 

Each action we take is a seed planted in the soil of existence. Our only true point of influence lies in the quality of the seeds themselves and the intention with which we plant them. Each of our actions should be with the right intention — the intention of doing good and being good.

Intention becomes our compass — not a map to a predetermined destination, but a direction for this moment. When we act with genuine goodness, with the desire to create rather than control, to give rather than take, to understand rather than judge, we plant worthy seeds. The purest intention requires no specific outcome, no guaranteed harvest. It is complete in itself.

Consider the gardener who prepares the soil with care, selects seeds with wisdom, and plants them with precision. Then comes the critical moment of surrender. They don’t hover anxiously, digging up seeds to check their progress. They neither expect nor demand that each seed follow a predetermined timeline of growth. They continue their work, planting the next row, tending what needs tending, and allowing the natural process to unfold.

This is not passivity or indifference. The gardener labor’s diligently, but without the neurosis of control. They understand that some seeds will flourish while others fail, that some plants will bear fruit while others provide shade, that some harvests will be abundant while others teach resilience. They accept this not as personal success or failure, but as the nature of life itself.

This approach requires us to examine our relationship with hope, desire, and expectation — those forward-looking states that often masquerade as positive but actually disconnect us from the present. Hope implies dissatisfaction with what is. It places fulfillment perpetually ahead of us rather than within our grasp. While it can provide comfort in difficult times, hope becomes problematic when it becomes our primary orientation to life. When we live in hope, we live avoiding fear, waiting and always deferring our complete engagement with the now.

Similarly, desire and expectation create a cognitive dissonance between our present experience and some imagined future state. We become attached not to our actions themselves but to specific outcomes. We plant seeds not for the inherent goodness of planting but also demand the fruit they bear (expectation) and the also the quality of fruit itself (desire). This attachment inevitably leads to suffering — either through disappointment when results don’t match expectations or through the insatiable cycle of fulfilled desires spawning new desires.

Living without hope, desire, and expectation doesn’t mean abandoning care or falling into nihilism. Rather, it means finding fulfillment in the integrity of our actions themselves. We plant good seeds because planting good seeds is itself worthwhile, regardless of what eventually sprouts. We act with love and kindness because it is its own reward, not because it guarantees reciprocation.

This is a profound shift from outcome-oriented to process-oriented living. The quality of our presence becomes more important than the products of our action. We move from a life of anxious achievement to one of aligned becoming. Living in the now with good intentions is not a destination but a daily practice. Each day, each moment, each action presents a new opportunity to ask, “What seeds am I planting now?”

Each interaction becomes a moment of choice about the quality of presence we bring. Each challenge offers an opportunity to respond from our foundational values rather than our reactive fears. This practice doesn’t promise perfection or constant peace. We will forget, react, and fall back into old patterns of hope and fear. What matters is our willingness to begin again, to return to the free-fall present, to recommit to the integrity of our intentions.

Nothing I say here is new; these ideas have been mentioned in philosophical texts and traditions across time. Buddhist traditions talk about Sunyata (emptiness) and groundlessness. Stoic Philosophy discusses what we can and cannot control. The seed-planting metaphor particularly resonates with the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on Karma Yoga, which emphasizes righteous action without attachment to results.

I invite you to join me in our dance with the free-fall & in sowing the right seeds every moment. The inquiry that now emerges: how do we interact with others in this mutual free-fall, and what ethical choices become available to us in this shared condition of groundless presence?

Read the next article: Navigating mutual free-fall: Ethical choices in a groundless world