I had coffee the other day with someone who wanted to buy a couple of my new books. He regaled me for over an hour with stories about himself. When I tactfully mentioned that I needed to wind things up to make another appointment he launched into a lengthy story about his father.
I won’t be having coffee with him again.
This man is not unusual. Most people rarely wonder “Would this person be interested in what I’m about to say?”
The deeper issue is addiction to our personal history. We live in our past, especially as we age and the future seems to hold less promise, in fact we’d rather avoid thinking about what’s coming.
So, imagine driving with your eyes glued to the rear view mirror. A crash is likely. To drive safely, we look through the windshield … so we know where we’re going! We also glance in the rear view to maintain peripheral awareness. That’s important. But it’s not the priority.
The life long habit of past preoccupation instills a dangerous habit: being a spectator. That’s what we are when we look back because what we see has already happened… we can’t change it. Then we look at our future the same way, with a subconscious conviction of resignation: what will be will be.
We’ll continue to age and our bodies will break down, friends will die and then we will.
Sounds exciting! No wonder we’d rather relive that first kiss or throwing the winning touchdown pass.
Meanwhile, we’re designed to create. We live in a body that started out as two cells and became … this! We learned to walk, to talk, to build a career, relationships… a whole life, from nothing but those two cells!
This is a miracle that we live with every moment of every day. So how can it be that so many of us are overwhelmed, depressed, and anxious? We’ve lost touch with our creativity. We view our future the way we view our past and we give up.
Alright. Enough said. What now?
Every day at noon my phone alert goes off and I pause to declare: “This is the moment. Something wonderful is happening. I am creating my future with…” And I complete that sentence with a single word, the one word that captures my feeling of the moment. Peace. Love. Gratitude. Excitement.
I make it up.
I create that word in the moment. And this 30 second practice is a daily reminder that the future is mine to create, however I wish.
I wrote about this in my book The Noon Club. I have hundreds of friends around the world who’ve set their phone alerts just like I have. Throughout a range of time zones we are broadcasting this pulse of creativity at noon… every day.
Consider joining us and here’s a link to the book. Develop the habit of creating rather than languishing in remembering.
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