According to this teaching, how we relate to each present moment—with openness, friendliness, gentleness, and warriorship—is not merely a philosophical stance but an active force that shapes our future. By thought, speech, and action, we either create new possibilities for opening or reinforce existing habits, fears, and prejudices. The teaching addresses why uncertainty becomes harder to befriend as we age, not because we cannot learn, but because physical and mental changes amplify our instinct to seek control through rigid patterns. The core invitation is to make friends with the full range of life experience—pleasant and unpleasant, smooth and rough—as part of the natural fabric of existence.
How Does Present Moment Awareness Determine Your Future?
Pema Chödrön opens by asserting that our relationship to the present moment creates a tangible effect on how we will relate to our future. This is not metaphorical: the seeds we sow through how we think, speak, and act in this moment germinate into patterns that extend far beyond the next hour. They shape not just the next moment but the next day, week, month, year, and the years of our lives. When we regard what happens to us with openness and friendliness, we are actively cultivating a nervous system and a mind that will naturally incline toward receptivity. Conversely, when we respond to difficulty with contraction and resistance, we strengthen the neural pathways and mental habits that make future resistance easier.
The language Chödrön uses—openness, friendliness, gentleness, and warriorship—points to something concrete, not abstract. These are not empty words or aspirational ideals floating in the ether. They describe the *posture* we take toward the present moment, and that posture is generative. Every time we choose openness over defensiveness, we are training ourselves to choose it again. Every time we meet discomfort with gentleness rather than judgment, we are creating new neural grooves that make gentleness the path of least resistance.
What Role Does Habit and Conditioning Play?
The teaching distinguishes between creating new possibilities for opening and strengthening pre-existing patterns. By how we think, speak, and act, we are doing one or the other—there is no neutral ground. We are either expanding our capacity for uncertainty, or we are making our fears, prejudices, and habitual reactions stronger. Chödrön emphasizes this point: we can strengthen pre-existing propensities, pre-existing habits, pre-existing fears, and pre-existing prejudices. We can make them stronger and stronger.
This recognition cuts to the heart of why change feels difficult. It is not that we are incapable of learning new responses—the old adage "you cannot teach an old dog new tricks" is not a law of physics. Rather, our repeated choices have built deep grooves in consciousness. When we habitually avoid discomfort, we strengthen the very avoidance patterns that keep us trapped. When we habitually judge ourselves or others, we deepen the networks of judgment. The good news is the inverse is also true: each moment offers a fresh opportunity to choose differently.
Why Does Uncertainty Become Harder With Age?
Chödrön reflects on her own experience turning 70, noting that while it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, the common saying exists as a truism for a reason. The physical body—that vehicle we live in—begins to fall apart. Joints ache, digestion becomes unreliable, memory falters. These are not moral failures; they are the natural consequences of time's passage. But they have a psychological effect.
When the body is uncomfortable, when there is chronic pain or unpredictable physical sensations, the mind seeks certainty wherever it can find it. If the lamp is moved two inches to the right, it represents a threat to the remaining certainties we can control. The position of that lamp becomes invested with safety and security precisely because so much else is no longer reliable. Chödrön acknowledges this may sound petty, but it is the same dynamic that operates across all ages. The teenager, the person in their twenties, thirties, forties—all are already engaged in avoiding insecurity, avoiding uncertainty, avoiding discomfort in any form.
What changes with age is not the desire to avoid discomfort but the desperation. When the body itself is a source of unpredictability, the impulse to lock down everything controllable becomes more intense. This is why elderly people often get very fixed in their ways. It is not rigidity for its own sake; it is a natural (if counterproductive) response to accumulated uncertainty.
What Does It Mean to Make Friends With Uncertainty?
Chödrön and her dialogue partner (Meg, referenced in the transcript) are encouraging a radically different orientation: to make friends with the whole picture. Not to selectively open to the pleasant and close to the unpleasant, but to open to both. To befriend the salty and the sweet, the rough and the smooth. These are not poetic metaphors but descriptions of concrete life experience.
Making friends with uncertainty means recognizing that difficulty, change, discomfort, and loss are not interruptions to life—they are part of the natural fabric of life itself. When we stop fighting this fundamental truth, we stop wasting energy on the impossible task of creating a life without change. Instead, that energy becomes available for meeting what actually arises with presence and resourcefulness.
This is where the word "warriorship" enters. Warriorship in this context is not aggression or conquest; it is the courage to stay present and engaged even when things are uncomfortable. It is the strength to keep your heart open when it would be easier to close it. A warrior in this sense is not someone who vanquishes enemies but someone who does not turn away from reality.
How Do Our Choices Shape the Nervous System?
Implicit in this teaching is an understanding of how repeated choices rewire the nervous system. Each time we choose to stay present with discomfort rather than escape it, we are sending a signal to the nervous system: "This is survivable. I do not need to panic." Over time, the nervous system learns. The baseline level of defensiveness can lower. Triggers that once seemed catastrophic become workable.
Conversely, each time we flee, judge, or contract, we are reinforcing the message: "This is dangerous. Stay vigilant. Stay defended." The nervous system learns this too, and it learns it more easily because fear and contraction are faster, more familiar pathways.
The teaching suggests that our moment-to-moment choices are not insignificant personal quirks; they are literally shaping the organism we inhabit and will inhabit tomorrow, next year, for the rest of our lives. In this sense, how we relate to the present moment is not a philosophical question but a practical, embodied one.
Where to go from here
The immediate application of this teaching is to bring awareness to how you are relating to the present moment right now. Not what you are doing, but *how* you are doing it. Are you relating with openness or defensiveness? Gentleness or harshness? Can you notice, without judgment, where you habitually contract? Where do you habitually avoid? These observations are not failures; they are data. They are the first step in creating different possibilities. As Chödrön suggests, you might explore what would happen if you intentionally opened to one thing today—one small discomfort, one difficult emotion, one moment of uncertainty—with friendliness rather than avoidance. Not to become perfect or transcendent, but to practice sowing different seeds.
