This builds a lot upon what I wrote yesterday on The First Morning Blurb so, if you haven’t checked that out, please do so.
10/03/2022
I think a lot about the future.
A friend of mine once asked me: “Luisa, how often do you think about the future? About how the decisions that you make today are going to impact you tomorrow?”
The answer was: “Every single second of every single day”.
At the time, I somewhat prided myself in that ability. The instinct to weight the pros and cons, analyze and evaluate every decision that I made.
But it also made it always feel like I was waiting.
I was always wisely preparing for the next task, and I mean this in the smallest scale. It was a constant organization and synchronization of every activity.
This is not something only I struggle with, it isn’t news to anyone that the biggest problem with humanity (or at least as far as “being happy” goes) is that we are constantly either mulling over the past, or stressing over the future.
We stare at the uncertainty of life and think that the ability of – if ever so slightly – controlling the future to be our personal breakthrough.
But getting away from it all, finding myself doing the thing that I was “preparing” for , made me aware of all the moments that – on my preparations for the “future” – I actually missed out on enjoying to the fullest.
Because, in the end, this is it. This moment right here and right now is it.
And it has always been it.
I think so much about the impact that I want to have, the change that I want to make in the future, that I sometimes look away from the change that I’m already making, the impact that I’m already having.
The impulse to say: “I’m planning to do X” is, to some extent, just a way of delaying the responsibility of doing X now; and blaming the past: “I’m not doing X because Y fell trough”, is just a way of putting ourselves as victims of the natural chaos of life.
I am deciding to take responsibility for who I am today, in this moment, right now.
I take full responsibility for figuring out and finding solutions around what didn’t work yesterday, and doing as much as I can, with the tools that I have, towards the things that I wish for the future.
From the outside, the practice might look the same. It does boil down to taking action on goals and dreams, and everything that I’ve wrote about defining these still applies. But it’s the shift in mindset from: “I’m waiting until I’m someplace else, someway else” to: ” there’s nowhere else, noway else, I should be”.
P.S.: I’m going to Milan this weekend! But more on that later 🙂