A question was posed to me this weekend…how do you see the future…do you see it as a repeat of the past…just more of the present…or…do you see it as endless possibilities…
Ouch…
I consider myself to be a pretty optimistic gal…but…I realized that in that moment…that…honestly…when I truly attempt to imagine the future…I tend to focus on the first two options…
According to…Bertha…that is because…I try to make the future be…realistic…
But…isn’t that the responsible thing to do…isn’t it responsible to imagine a future that I can realistically have…
Bertha…laughs and says…NO…
She reminds me…that the future is mine to…create…and…that I don’t have to control all the pieces…I don’t have to know exactly how things will happen…that actually when I do that…I limit the…wonderful…endless…possibilities of…life…
She then reminds me of a technique…I learned in a seminar a few years back…when imagining the future…go far enough out…that…I’m not trying to manage the details…
Say…I wanted to be a famous author…doing tours across America…being interviewed on major television shows…that kind of thing…if I try to imagine it…for next year…then…I get bogged down in the details…well…how could that happen so soon…blah…blah…blah…
But…if I imagine it…ten…fifteen…twenty…years in the future…it’s easier to just seem myself doing that…and…not attending to the details at all…
She says…the trick is…to go out as far as necessary…to get out of the details…for me…I know I can’t retire for seven more years…so…anything I imagine sooner than that…gets muddied…by…what about work…so…I’m shooting for…ten to fifteen years out…
According to…Bertha…the cool thing is…the more I focus on this long term future…the more steps I start taking…to make it be a reality…whether it is…taking a class…putting a little more money in my retirement account…or…working on that next book…
Hmmm…
Jane
