I’m always eager to write about whatever spiritual and/or self-help goodies I’m consuming. It helps me with processing, but I also really, really hope that, through the magic of divine coincidence, whatever I’ve stumbled upon this week is something one of you needs to hear as well.
I’m going to file these summaries under a new category named for the deepest hope and ambition I can conjure: Perhaps This is Helpful.
I read a fair amount of dystopian fiction, so for me, the distant future is less about robots doing my laundry and more of a totalitarian, Bradbury-esqe hellscape. People are usually being injected with things, surgically altered, or, of course, thrown into giant enclosures to battle their way to an untimely death (and if you think that’s just a Hunger Games reference, you gotta read more YA novels. Death by coliseum is a hot market). For the near future, I prefer to assume cataclysmic global events are right around the corner, as it prevents me from doing the absolute worst thing a human can do:
Thinking about things that might actually happen.
Considering what could plausibly occur in the next few days, weeks, or even years is a terrible way to spend your time. I mean, yes, pay your bills and get a flu shot and make sure you can cook the tilapia a day or two after you buy it, but other than that, future thinking is just a well-being grenade. It tricks you into thinking that if you just prepare enough, or just worry enough, you will be better equipped to handle every single possible curveball that life can wing across your plate.
These are lies. I have lived these lies. And they almost always involve Pinterest.
My well-laid anxiety plans have been decimated enough times to prove this point (most notably the not one but TWO “medication-free birth plans” I created, both of which of the actual babies I had blew up in rather spectacular fashion), but it still doesn’t always stick. The problem seems to be—as any chronic worrier can tell you—that if you worry enough, occasionally you will anticipate the correct worst-case scenario. And then you say, “YOU SEE?? What if I HADN’T been stockpiling pineapple tidbits for the great pineapple tidbit shortage of 2021? Hmm? Where would your perfectly moist carrot cake be now? HMMMMM?” Your neuroses get rewarded, and so you continue pulling on that anxiety slot machine, looking for the next tidbit hit.
Well, I needed a reminder of the insanity of this little pastime this week, and I got it on a reread of Warrior Goddess Training by HeatherAsh Amara. You can see from the photo above that I underline this passage every. single. time. For some reason, though, this week kind of felt like finding it anew.
She’s talking about the types of thoughts that take us out of the present moment, and when she gets to thoughts of the future, she says something that seems incredibly obvious but for some reason just isn’t: “…remember, ALL future thinking is imaginary.”
Have you ever really considered that? Because I sure hadn’t.
“…remember, ALL future thinking is imaginary.” –HeatherAsh Amara
Every time you think about the future, for good and bad, you are living in the land of make believe. You are just making stuff up. All of it. Your dinner plans for tomorrow? Imaginary. The reunion you’re sure is coming? The confrontation you’re dreading, the trouble with your someday teenagers, the presentation you’re going to botch? Fake fake, fake, fake.
None of your future plans or fears are real. They exist in one place and one place only: the world of pure imagination. And I don’t need to remind you how the boat ride there goes, right?
I don’t know if this is as mind-blowing a thought for you as it was for me, but I’ll back it up with our requisite weekly Eckhart. This is from The Power of Now, which is rounding out my audiobook lineup this week: “You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.”
…Right?
You can do something about problems that are actually happening to you in this moment, and if you’re present, you’ll always have the tools you need when you need them. But you can’t hammer your way out of make believe, now can you?
“You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.” –Eckhart Tolle
When you and I worry about the future, we are creating problems that we’re physically unable to solve… because they don’t exist. So then we can’t move past them, because they’re always there, in our imaginations. This is how a midnight trip to the bathroom becomes a four-hour rumination on what you’ll do when you finally see that guy again, the one who said that one thing to you that one time five years ago.
My success in remembering this wisdom varies, but I have found that my best weapon against future thinking is meditation. It puts me in the habit of questioning my thoughts, most of which are pretty stupid really. But I also highly recommend just repeating the first quote to yourself whenever you start down the worry road. ALL future thinking is imaginary, friends. Might as well imagine something cool.
Or, OR, even better, get out of your imagination and live in the present. There’s probably some good stuff happening there. As a wise and ridiculously cute person once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
…perhaps this is helpful?
