Be. Here. Now...

Whether my thoughts were positive and uplifting or negative and stress filled, the result was the same, I was absent.

A couple things I had to ask myself was, why am I always trying to live out my future in my head? Why am i always reliving my past in my head? This took a long time for me to figure out, and I’m still working on it to this day, but I finally figured part of it out.

When I was reliving my past I was expressing, to myself, a level of disappointment in myself. I would beat myself up over things that I felt I could have done better on. When I did this though, it would lead me into a sort of “funk” that was really hard to get myself out of. It would lead to self doubt and self sabotage. It would lead to a lack of confidence and that lack of confidence would trickle into so many areas in my life, to the point where I just felt stuck in so many ares of my life.

When I was living out my future in my head, I was sort of getting lost in daydreams. While daydreaming is good, it can go too far. I was catching myself listening to the kids in the background and being aware of what’s going on, yet not hearing them talking to me. They would have to say my name multiple times to snap me out of my thoughts.

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance and the wise grows it under their feet”

— Inky Johnson

Then I realized how important it was for me to work on “hitting snooze” on these thoughts. There was nothing wrong with me thinking about my past, I just had to reframe how I looked at failures and disappointments (that’ll be another post). There was nothing wrong with me daydreaming, I was fully aware that dreams and visions will play a huge role for my future. But I had to realize that these thoughts have a time and place. And after school and after work is not the time. This time is for my family, to connect with them, to be there for them and this is the time for me to battle, and ultimately be captured by, the one and only Spider-Man.

So I have taught myself, and am teaching myself more each day, how important it is not to live in the past and not to live in the future, but to be present in the here and now. After all, that’s the only thing we’re guaranteed.