None of us is getting any younger, which means we've all got voluminous pasts, with calamities and hurts, yes, but also victories and achievements.
And as we get older, moving through different phases of our lives, especially when it comes to physical changes, it's quite easy to look back a little wistfully… and to look forward with a degree of trepidation.
I mean, what's going to happen? What's it going to be like? Is it all downhill from here?
It came up with a client the other day, who confessed that they were experiencing that double whammy: not really looking forward to growing older, and maybe hanging on a little bit to former glories.
What to do about this? was the question, hanging in the air.
It cut deeper than just surface level for me, because I'm as guilty of this as the next person! I don't have too many pictures dotted around my office, but this is one of them:
It's not like I've been chasing that feeling ever since or anything (I stopped racing a long time ago) but I do still commit to not just maintaining, but increasing my fitness each year, and I definitely get a buzz out of beating a bunch of years-old personal bests, on my good days.
I don't see too much wrong with this (otherwise I wouldn't do it, lol) so long as we hold it lightly enough. And accept that every high, every peak could be the last.
But the mind can take these things a bit too far, and use the past in an attempt to somehow try and hold off the future, and that becomes problematic.
Up to its tricks, it imagines how the future is going to be, doesn't like the story it's created and subsequently scrabbles around in the past for something to hold on to, because it thinks it's safe in the known.
Again, nothing wrong here per se—just a mind, doing what minds do—but if we don't spot it, and keep dancing to its tune, attaching our wellbeing to the past, then I just think we run the risk of closing the door on who we could be, in the future.
If all our attention is being used up in looking backwards, it shuts us down a bit to the opportunities of what's to come.
Because honestly – we don't have any idea about what the future holds! As Alan Watts said,
“You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
😳
Just because the mind makes out like it knows, doesn't mean it knows!
So you all have my permission to be as excited as you like about the direction life is going to take you – who knows who you'll become and what you'll achieve?
Nobody!
✨
Giles
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