Are you mindlessly wasting your precious time....?
.....or are you using your superpower to bring the future into the present?
Image by Mollyroselee from Pixabay
Three weeks into the new year.
Time feels as though it is moving quickly, and I find myself in an inner dialogue….
How present have I been with each of the 21 days that have passed?
How many of the 504 hours have I truly appreciated?
How much of my attention has been with the thousands of unique, never to be experienced again, moments?
And how much of that time has slipped away without my conscious awareness? What have I missed?
The start of a new year seems to invite a sense of looking forward, dreaming, planning and anticipating what may unfold. We can (quite unconsciously), find ourselves spending a lot of time in anticipation of the future and consequently missing out on what is occurring in the present. Perhaps the darker, colder days and nights (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) and the desire to get through them and on to the lighter, brighter spring that lies ahead contributes to this tendency to be future focused.
The future is enticing, alluring, mysterious. Full of possibility and potential. It’s hard not be seduced into hanging out there! It’s not wrong to allow yourself to be seduced, in fact, it’s near impossible to stop our minds from going there. And why would we want to anyway?
Well, that question leads me to the nub of what has been occurring to me as I notice the dates ticking by.
As a faithful daily meditator and decade and a half practitioner of mindfulness, the practice of being fully present in the moment and recognising when I am caught up in the past or the future and gently, patiently and without judgement, bringing myself back to the here and now is part of who I am and how I show up in the world. And yet……..!
Today, I realised that since the 1st January, somewhere in the background, there has been a sneaking desire to fast forward to points in the future that I am excited about (a camper van trip with my husband, a trekking holiday in Eastern Europe, the start of a new client relationship, going on retreat, having a glass of wine after a period of abstinence to name just a few!). As I acknowledged the date – 21st January 2025 – it brought this future focus clearly into my awareness. I hadn’t realised that, even with my daily meditation practice, I was kind of treading water until the fun stuff arrived. Mindlessly allowing the days to slip away.
Now, I know that judging myself and allowing the ego to claim I am “not really mindful after all” or that my years of practice “count for nothing” (my ego can be quite harsh at times!) is unhelpful and frankly not true, so instead of allowing that to happen, I sat with this sense of being mindlessly in the future to see what would emerge.
What I am about to share may not sound profound or enlightened but it was deeply reassuring to me and maybe will be to you too.
Living a mindful life does not mean cutting ourselves off from the anticipation and excitement of imagining our future life nor does it mean waiting until that future event is here in the present to enjoy it. The most wonderful, incredible and brilliant thing about being human is that we CAN anticipate the future, we can feel how we might feel in that future scenario, we can see it and hear it as if it was happening now. And that is true even if we’ve never experience it before. We have the capacity to create the future in the present with our imagination and that is a superpower in my eyes!
Why wouldn’t we be with that, indulge it, soak it up, feel into those feelings with all our being? It is a true joy in life and what is life for if not for experiencing joy?
It doesn’t need to come at the expense of being present.
We can be present with our fantasies and imagination as much as we can be present with washing the dishes or listening to our partner talking about their day at work. We can feel the butterflies in our tummy, the increase in heart rate, the uplifting shift in energy, the buzz that often comes with anticipating something we’re looking forward to. So, rather than judging ourselves (not very mindful!) we can embrace this incredible superpower and bring it into our everyday experience.
As I sit here now, I am aware of my body sitting on the chair, my fingers touching the keyboard, my breath moving gently in and out, I can see people walking up the street, I can hear the birds in the garden and smell the candle burning in the corner of the room – fully present with the here and now.
The next time I find myself dreaming about a future adventure, I can remind myself that taking a trip into the future in my mind does not need to disconnect me from the present. I can be both fully aware of and alert to how my experience unfolds moment by moment whilst still benefiting from the joy and energy that comes from looking forward to a future adventure.
So, where will you let your mind take you?
What future experiences will you allow yourself to bring into the present?