Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.
George Orwell
You must take control of your present reality. Your life, your dreams, and in fact the well being and happiness of those that are connected to you depend greatly on your courage to take full control of your present. But what does that mean? It means taking ownership and responsibility of everything that has happened in the past. Everything right up to this very moment. It means ceasing control of the past, because only people who control of their present have the ability and the wherewithal to bend back and control the past.
What does that look like? It varies and is as unique as your and I. Taking control of today means that you don’t let the mistakes of yesterday stop you from taking actions today, and likewise, you don’t let the success of yesterday impart on you a false sense of confidence, because the world you find yourself in today, is not the world you lived in yesterday. Parents often fall victim to this. They try to imprint on their children the values that helped them when they were younger. But that doesn’t always work. What we did to get by or excel, may or may not hold true for the next generation. We no longer train against nuclear annihilation by hiding under our desk, so perhaps having rules that push or limit children’s reality of where they are, simply because the parent can’t relate to it, may not help but in fact hurt the child.
It’s all about the future. The future is exciting, and carries so much potential precisely because it is unwritten, and absolutely anything can happen. But you will not find the future you want and seek if you can’t be open and seize the present moment. Doing and being in the moment guards us against what has come before us. We have learned our history and are on guard against the dangers of repeating it. Nor do we let what once was, what always seems to be, dictate our actions today. And it is our actions today, that make it possible for the reality of a future that does not exist.
You can control your future. You can’t predict it or manipulate it, but you can get ready for it. If you live in Florida or the Caribbean, hurricanes and storms are always coming. If you live north of the hundredth meridian, winter is always coming. But we don’t sit still. We fill sandbags, and board up windows, perhaps even vacate our homes, and we buy winter coats, put on winter tires, and dust of our winter jackets. If we can do that for tropical storms and the changing seasons, why can’t we do that for absolutely everything else in our life.
If you accept the reality that today you can do something, than you accept ownership of what you have done or haven’t done in the past. If you control today, and own what you did yesterday, than you can control what is to come, because you are going to now do, what needs to be done, and adjust your efforts along the way.
Today is the only thing that matters.
Leave history to historians and fiction writers. Leave the future to economist, mystics, and sooth sayers. Own today. Act today, and your control of the present moment will ultimately give you ownership of your past, and a title deed to a future yet to come.
