I’ve spent a lifetime looking toward the future and all the things that will make me happy once I achieve them. The funny thing was that once I achieved that next best thing, it didn’t make me happy.
I could never understand why.
How could I achieve such great things and be so accomplished and never be happy?
Simple, I achieved so much to make others happy and to do what I thought I should do to be happy. I also had trained myself to look past the here and now and to look only at the future. So once I achieved that future moment, it ended up in a “here and now” and I didn’t know how to be happy in the here and now.
I had to change that. I had to learn how to let go of all the expectations and the future vision of my self. I had to re-train myself to be in the here and now and “enjoy it!”
What a task I had put before myself! It seemed so simple at the onset. I thought that I could live in the here and now and let go of expectations easily.
Well, here I am nearly four years later and just getting to the point where I understand what it means to stop living in the future. It’s been a lot of practice and it’s taken a lot of self awareness that I haven’t liked very much honestly. But I’m here!
The funny thing is I’m not here really. I still am a creature of habit. I still want to envision the future and escape out of the here an now and believe happiness lies elsewhere, especially when I realize how human I am as well as how human others are.
It’s somehow a comfort to me to envision how “I will be” or how the “situation will be” once this event or that thing is achieved. I get caught in the clouds and shut down from reality when I feel lost.
Then I remember, I’m here and it’s now. I must practice being and letting go. I don’t predict the future or control it. My happiness does not lie there, it lies here.
It’s all the small moments that make up my journey.
Happiness lies in this moment and I choose to be in it.
