Month: October 2015

This one is about making decisions for the future, decisions that if foresightful enough, your future self would like to enter a time machine and come back in time to thank you for them. How foresightful can foresightful be though? And why do we include foresight in the conversation of life decisions? While the modern age is one of planning and strategising, everything from mindfulness to love is all about living in the now and living life to the fullest, a cliche expression that is so cliche that it looks like no one has really managed to really do that in life and is just using it as wishful thinking or to feel part of the ‘new’ age of thought, which is anything but new however as it’s trending in and out of pop culture i assume it catches the attention of new people every time. So what is in life other than surviving for as long as possible? Is it to be understood? To contribute to society? To become more powerful and influential than your parents? To serve a family name? While the answer may be scientifically answered by existing research pondering about it seems important, ever evolving and never ending, at least it is for me. Human beings are supposed to differ from other animals in that we have consciousness, thinking about life and death, contributing to unproven theories with our conversations and blogs. What is it so important for us in life that we constantly review decisions and plans that have already expired? For sure learning from past mistakes is key to survival however it seems that we plan for something bigger than ourselves. Do we even know where we are getting at? Of course not, however we like to think that with practice we can become more precise in our planning and while this approach serves to reaching a goal that we have clearly or not in our head this whole process helps us becoming masters in travelling through life and while we don’t live in the now, we spend a lot of time to make sure we reach an abstract goal or reality. I guess when what you focus and plan on is inexistent and a thought of the now, it is another form of living in the moment but perhaps one that puts you into a maze of gradual realisations in contrast to a form of living that includes a road that one doesn’t care how long it is and what is at the end of it, if it ends at all. It’s important to understand that life is more than achieving goals and reaching checkpoints, to understand that is rather about all the work, time laid forward and experience received to reach something. Are people greedy in their pursuit of goals? Surely we all know of people who while they claim that the next goal is the ultimate goal that will change their lives, reaching that only reveals the next goal and reaching the latter reveals an other goal. Should one be discouraged by this continuous replacement of the ultimate goal by another ultimate goal? I think the answer lies in the feelings we have when reaching a goal. If you felt that this wasn’t the ultimate one then maybe you are not setting goals in the right place. If you set goals to make your life fuller and time after time the achievement falls short to that task then maybe those goals are not the ones to fulfil your life’s purpose. So what is life purpose anyway? Is it really a fixed concept or does it change as we take each and every one step. Looking back ten years from now, will a ‘life’s purpose’ be the theme of specific 10 years of your life? While we may all think as life purpose one single thing that serves and fulfils every aspect of our life once realised, rather it looks like it’s something that keeps you going through challenging times, through times of growth. The growth that is made up, not of the goals as such but of the pursuit of goals, the grinding in the meantime. So there is something to remember in consequence. Let’s appreciate our self of today. Let’s not be snobs of ourselves in the now thinking that where we are now is something our future self will not want to be associated with. Our self now is the one putting in the work. Working every day for that goal, learning about itself, exploring and acknowledging ultimately that the now is what we should put in our memories and not reserve the front-row memory slots for the future. The now is the creator, the inventor, the worker and the dreamer. Respect what yourself is doing now as yourself now is all you are at that time and place. Respect the feelings of sadness, of uncertainty, of regret, of hope, as these feelings are the fever reaction of yourself struggling through uncertainty, grinding, keeping on, standing proud for while the future self is the one that will please the outsiders, the self of the now is the one that really only matters and the one that should be respected the most, most importantly, by you.