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# Looking forward
- URL: https://www.gilespcroft.com/looking-forward/
- Published: 2025-04-24T07:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-12-07T16:13:46.000Z
- Description: It's easy to vilify future-thinking, but it's not *bad* per se… you can use it to your advantage! 🔮
- Author: Giles P Croft
- Tags: Goals, Presence, Productivity, Creativity, Real stories, Cooking, Quick insight, IMPLICATIONS

‘Looking forward’– it’s no bad thing.

In fact, as humans I think we’re probably set up to have some future stuff to be pulled towards. Otherwise goals wouldn’t be a thing, would they?

So I made the decision to cook curry—a new one!—and all of a sudden I’ve noticed, I have a real sense of purpose; of drive.

I’m excited! I know that I’ll be cooking curry in a few days time.

I’m **looking forward** to it.

#### What this means:

- There’s a process that will occur. That’s fun, for a start: Planning. Maybe watching old episodes of a Rick Stein TV series, to do some research. Shopping for ingredients.
- Maybe my daughter will get involved.
- How I’ll cook it, which pan it will go best in; hob, or oven?
- Even if it turns out to be rubbish, I’ll still get to go through this process of cooking curry. (It usually turns out great.)
- I know I’m stocking back up the freezer, for future effort-free curries.

All these things, just off the top of my head, here and now.

#### What it’s not

- Attaching to an outcome (I’m curious to see if it turns out rubbish, and if so, how can I make it better)?
- Doing it all the time so it becomes routine (you can have too much of a ‘good thing’)
- Turning it into a ‘how to’ feel good (classic mind).

But there’s something here, isn’t there? About working with the mind and its tendency to ‘look forward.’

It’s like giving the mind a project to tick away with on the back burner, so it’s not engaged in less salubrious activities.

Reminds me of a bit from one of Steve Chandler’s books, where he says:

> “People without a project worry a lot. Worry becomes the project. The brain wants to DO SOMETHING. So, without a project, it worries.”

Got me a project.

Curry.

😋

Giles

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