Occupying

[sansarag]

We have no idea how the future will turn out.It’s important to think about what you can do today that will give you better odds tomorrow.Wisdom, health and wealth, in that order, give you better leverage that anything else.Not everything we wish for will come true.Nature and logic always have other plans.And because we make plans for the future in our heads while ignoring the present and tell ourselves these plans will come to fruition, the blow is harder when they don’t.We then proceed to curse fate and the world for conspiring to ensure our failure.Over time, we come to accept our fate, but we lose both time and energy in the cursing phase.Stoic philosophy speaks of something called ‘Amor Fati’ or ‘a love of fate’.It says that since all we have control over is the present, we must focus on the now and accept our fate with open arms.It tells us to not waste time on broken dreams but look at every failed dream or plan as fuel to do better, to progress further.Use this failure to channel greatness, or just plain progress, into ourselves.Anger is easy, acceptance is hard.Focus on the present so we can build the trust in ourselves to better embrace the future.I trusted myself to live in the present, in a way that would take care of my future self.And the more I trusted myself, the less I saw myself worrying about the future.Living in the present is tough.It requires us to face not only our life as it is but also our feelings as they truly are.And more often than not, we don’t feel great or motivated or happy.Life can suck very badly at most times in the present.So we try our best to ignore how much it sucks by finding distractions anywhere we can.We scroll through feeds of happy images and looped videos of fun, we doom scroll through randomness and binge watch to disconnect.And we often emerge feeling like the world seems happier, more productive, motivated, shinier and basically more fun than our present.We then resolve to turn our frown upside down and be positive.But, before you say,‘What if I don’t feel like being positive right now’, wait!Understanding and embracing how we feel at any given moment, and being true to our feelings and what we have in front of us, can give us more clarity and focus than any fake sign of positivity.She said that to stay resilient, she needed to embrace how she was feeling in the moment, rather than embrace a positivity that wasn’t in her vision set.‘Present thinking brought beauty and goodness into my life, whereas positive thinking just made me feel like I was choosing the wrong emotional state,’ Andrew wrote.Positive Thinking Doesn’t Equal HappinessTo be able to find renewal within ourselves to bounce back and move ahead, we have to be honest with ourselves and explore our emotions.Because the one thing that clouds our mind the most is unresolved feelings and emotions.And the best way to move ahead is to face them and listen to them, not sweep them under the rug.So, embrace how you feel at this present moment and allow yourself to feel and heal as genuinely as you can.But the world changes in an instant, and so can the space you occupy in it.