I was reading this interview that Judd Apatow did with Mel Brooks for The Atlantic. If you know me, or if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, you know I love Mel. (I have written fondly about him many, many times.) The man’s lived an amazing life, so I always make time for a Mel interview or talk show appearance.
This latest interview closed with a fantastic back-and-forth between Mel and Judd:
Apatow: Your body of work is so enormous. How do you look at it now?
Brooks: I don’t look back at it. I simply don’t. I just know that we did a lot of good things.
Apatow: Well, there’s a quote from you where you said, “We should enjoy life; we should not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.”
Brooks: Yeah.
Apatow: Has that always been your philosophy?
Brooks: No, I just made that up at the moment.
The closing punchline aside, it’s that line — “we should not future ourselves so much” — that stuck with me. I know I’m guilty of getting ahead of myself and worrying about what might happen in a year or two or five. But I don’t know what will happen in the future, and neither do you.
Stay in the moment. Enjoy the moment.
Now yourself a little more.
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That’s a photo of Mel with his wife, Anne Bancroft, at the 1997 Emmys. It was taken by Alan Light, and reused here thanks to a Creative Commons license.