About a year ago I mused to myself; There must be a way. A way to make the present feel delicious and wonderful. And enough.
It’s funny, even that wish in itself was unfocused on the present. It was wishing for the present to be something it’s not. It was dripping with yearning: When will the present feel better?
There’s sometimes no way around it. Our ambush towards the future often leaves the present trampled. The embrace of Today gets left in the dust as we hope for the One Day, the Eventual, the Future!
But something has shifted recently for me. I’m trying to figure out what — but it’s there, a change.
In truth, as much as I’ve obsessed over the future, I’ve always hated it at the same time. It faces me harshly and with questions — too many questions. To me, the future isn’t framed in an open-ended way but rather with assumptions: “When will you do this? When will you do that?”
When will you achieve your goals?
This was a holy focus at one point for me: goalkeeping. Somehwere, my college-version of myself is still clinging to her planner, writing out manifestations like a hopeful prayer, reading about women who “lean in” and trying to place herself in a future where she can be a boss and a girl.
I think during that time I was in a different dimmension. I wasn’t fully alive and how could I have been? Maybe that’s dramatic. It just felt like some days my soul wasn’t there, it was suspended, while I planned. While I figured out the future, the present slipped through my fingers like sand.
And I think it’s because at that time, the future didn’t seem scary to me. I, proud and loud at the sharp age of 19, had it all mapped out from beginning to end. After staring death in the face I decided that the future was the only real thing I could count on.
Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I needed to be afraid. Just a little bit. I didn’t need to live life in fear, no. But not be so sure of it.
The one time I got the future told to me, I refused to let it scare me. Rather, I got angry and decided to use the false preminition given to me as a motivator to do the opposite. Same with my grief, pain and sorrow — the future simply became another form of fuel.
After my father's sudden death, my mother took us to a psychic when we were visiting our family in Lithuania. My mother, who was overcome with grief, decided it would help somehow.
The woman didn’t deal with tarot cards or crystal balls, rather she worked as a homeopathic healer; someone who could decide what your physical self needed, i.e. what foods you can or can't eat, when you should go to bed, where you should go to bed — all based on your aura or energy levels.
While some of those ideas make sense to me today — after all, how we treat our body often impacts the future of our physical and mental states. But at the time, her presumption to tell me what I did or did not need infuriated me.
Within several minutes of looking at me, she punctured the bubble I was crafting so nicely after my father’s death. All the plans I had — to be a journalist, a writer, maybe even a professor one day — she rebuked. “No, that’s not right for you,” she said with a calm smile. There was no universe where I would have ever accepted her words.
I told my mother “No” with tears in my eyes after our session. I would not do what she told me. And I wouldn’t cut out chocolate, either.
Reflecting on it now, maybe she was right. Maybe she could read my energy, grasp something about my future. After all, I tried being a tried and true journalist and I eventually I was, but then I wasn’t. Maybe she did grasp some kind of truth in the noise of my future.
The point is that in that moment, I wouldn’t accept any future other than the one I decided. And maybe both is a different kind of hell; being told your future as well as trapping yourself in one you can’t escape.
Now, I only listen to tarot readings that tell me the present. Because there is just as much unknown in the present as there is in the future. That’s the thing about wanting to know your future. It appears mystical, eternal; a blank page waiting ot be written on. It seduces you with its emptiness.
But the present is here — waiting to be explored and uncovered.
What changed? Maybe it’s been my ability to bask in the orange light. Maybe, I’ve simply forgotten about the future, abanoned it. Maybe, it became too hard to keep up with.
Dreaming about the future doesn’t give me solace anymore, instead it keeps me up at night, leaving me weary eyed and foggy-brained the next day. The future in a way, has tumbled in on itself for me — pulling my focus away from feeling the earth beneath my feat.
It makes sense that I needed the hope of tomorrow on certain days; when I was drenched in grief and sorrow; when the present felt uneasy; when the life I was living stung too much.
So, instead I blinked through my murkey eyes and prophesized what I would be, insead of what I am. They say focusing on the past can make you feel haunted, like you’re a shell of yourself. The same can be with focusing too much on our tomorrows.
Perhaps I simply know better now. I know the future won’t save me. Looking forward can be soothing at times; it can make me believe, give me faith, gift me with distraction. But I know now that I can’t get tangled up in it, atleast not in the way I did before. It can be a conduit for optimism and sometimes a replacement for it, too. But it’s not the answer. Not to our prayers nor our questions to the full moon.
Instead, I’ve become joyous towards the things I can’t predict.
Maybe the shift happened when I found love in the mundane and realized that there was so much of it. When I learned the harsh reality that some of my dreams may run dry one day — the excitement, the success, the intoxication — but the mundane will remain. The every day will remain.
There is no need to stay up all night, wishing for the next golden hour, the next taste of sweet cream in my coffee, the next spaghetti dinner after a long day. Or to lay out in my planner the date in which I’ll breathe in the trees or listen to the rain on my window. It’s when I took note of these moments that focusing on the future became nonsensical.
The rush towards the future suddenly felt like the biggest magic trick of all, feeling less real than God or fairies or even fortune tellers. Suddenly, there was no need for all that when you realize tomorrow is already real.
It’s all there, after all. Today.
— ac 🌹