MIND newsletter: Past, present and future
Happy Saturday everyone! 😉 It’s great to be back, surrounded with love from you and warm sunny days in Montreal.
Everything happens in circles, in spirals. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.
One thing I see consistently implied in many career development theories and life philosophies is the interconnectedness of the past, present and future in a life of a human being.
Doing inner work with myself and with others brought me to an observation. A majority of resistance, frustration, and disappointment when dealing with life events seems to come from our perception that past, present, and future are connected linearly, like the way we use a straight line to present our life timeline.
Linear means straight, sequential, immediate – as we expect doing one thing today will lead to an immediate outcome tomorrow, as we thought what has passed today will never come back tomorrow, as we hope things will stay the same.
What if past, present, and future are not depicted as a straight line?
What if they are not sequential?
A simple yet powerful exercise (Source: Life Reimagined, AARP) that I love doing with others is to draw a spiral. Pick 3 points on the spiral. Mark one as the year you were born, one to be the age you think you will live up to, and one as where you are today. How do you feel? What are your thoughts on the life you’ve lived so far?
Buddhist philosophy labels the past as no longer happening, the present as present happening and the future as not yet happening, hence it goes on saying “do not dwell in the past nor dream of the future, just concentrate the mind on the present moment”. The emphasis on the present moment of some current spiritual movements could be dangerously mistaken. Instead, I prefer this clarification:
“Visit the past, but don’t stay
Dream of the future, but don’t be attached
Be in the present, but never forget the causal law”
