Of all the creatures on this planet. We have something special that none of them possess.
We are the only ones who can simultaneously think about the past, present, and future from an abstract perspective.
No horses are planning out their walking schedules to improve efficiency, nor are there any centipedes eating less fuzzy greens in order to lose 0.5 milligrams before next summer.
Because of this unique mental skill, many humans spend a lot of their lives always imagining the “what could be’s” of the future or the “what if’s” of the past.
We spend our preteen life looking forward to teenage years, then our teens looking towards our twenties. Yet, when we arrive at each destination we often are so focused on the “next phase”, we don’t even get a chance to appreciate the moment we are living in.
In fact, we often skip right past a moment so quickly that when a few weeks or even years pass by, we wish you could go back and relive it or try to do it over again.
But since time travel has “yet to be invented”, those moments are basically untouchable and we cannot go back in time for a do-over.
And since we have all at some point or another looked back on a moment in our life where we wish we did things differently; we can learn something from that and apply it to today.
Instead of always living in the past, wishing, lamenting, or regretting the way things turned out. We can enjoy the current state of our lives and actually appreciate the beauty of our current daily life.
If you are always looking back with distaste or jumping ahead hoping for things to get better. You will end up paralyzed in the present. You cannot touch the past, nor can you skip ahead to the future. But you can take the lessons from the past and apply them today, with the hope and intention of creating the future you want.
But you can only do that by actually being present every single day.
So enjoy this moment, enjoy the next, and enjoy today.
You may have heard this before, but I don’t care, you need this advice today and you’ll need it a year from now.
In fact send yourself an email using emailfuture.com
Make sure that future you is still appreciating the moment. Perhaps send them back to this little blurb and remind them of the importance of TODAY.
-DT
