One day this spring, we walked through Ditmas Park’s sunlit flowering trees, along Albemarle Road, with its mansions and their columns and dormers and porticos that placed me in a southern novel.

Overcome by the loveliness of the day, I paused at a redbud tree to closely examine the lavender-pink explosions sprouting along the bark, a characteristic called cauliflory.

My lingering was making us late for our coffee stop and the subway trip home to meet friends for dinner. Chris pulled out his map and looked down and up, mentally making the necessary adjustments to get us home in time.

Typically, I think of myself as a “next” person, and Chris as a “now” person, but in that moment I wondered if I had it wrong.

“Now” people set a routine for each day and meet it; my dad was a Now, arriving home at 6 pm as regular as a ticking clock.

He and Chris would say, “When I make a plan I try to stick to it.”

Once in the groove of routine, the Now is fully immersed in the moment, able to focus or to be spontaneous, as the moment requires—or so I thought.

As in Phillip Larkin’s poem, “Next, Please,” I both worry over potential misfortune and live for the good things the future will supposedly bring.

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day

Till then we say

I, a Next, am the daughter of a Now. I am married to a Now. I work best for Nows, and often befriend Nows. I love dependable Nows—they calm my fretful mind like the therapeutic, stress-relieving “hug box” invented by Temple Grandin.

Yet I also want to shake up their disciplined ways and poke holes in their routines. A schedule can make me feel boxed, rebellious and stubborn like a hug box hugging too tight.

On Abermarle Road as Chris studied the map I studied him with a new awareness of the conundrum of the now. However focused a Now may appear to be, he’s actually thinking about the next.

I may worry and fret over the future, but I am the one who gets so caught up in the moment I lose all track of time and perspective. I’ll make ten Christmas presents two days before Christmas, or stay up late to get the last puzzle piece in before vacation ends.

Nows rarely lose perspective this way—they’re gauging, weighing and, like Chris on Albemarle Road, planning the next.

It’s paradoxical. If he has to be thinking of the next, of the time each thing is taking, is he ever really in the now?

As I watch Chris paint or take in a sunset or examine a tree, I’m certain of it. Still, maybe it’s harder to achieve now-moments than it looks, even for a Now.

Just as an on-time person has to be early to be on time, the now person has to be thinking of the next to be right here, right now, in the now.