You cannot know today, what you are going to feel tomorrow.
You can imagine the future and how glorious you will become, but that vision is nothing but an illusion, a fantasy that ultimately ends badly.
This will probably seem a touch simple at first blush, but it really isn’t.
We all do it and it is a really important to prepare ourselves, and wage war against our unbridled imagination.
We dream and feel that dream in the present.
We love and we hate. We derive pleasure and we embrace pain.
We derive and embrace everything. We feel and see our unrealized future.
We are very misguided when we attempt to project what we feel today, right at this moment, and imagine what our reality will feel one day and what our experience will be tomorrow.
It is a mistake to feel our happiness in the future.
It is a mistake, because our lows are never so low, and our highs are never so high. Our future is never as beautiful as we feel and imagine or as wretched and disastrous as we fear.
It would be a grave mistake for you to project your feelings into the future because it will ultimately discourage you and prevent you from doing what you should be doing.
Let us imagine for a moment that you dream of losing some weight and fitting into that snug and sexy, one piece cocktail dress. The dress you haven’t worn in years, that hangs at the back of the closet, along with your could have beens and should have beens.
You are miraculously transformed one day and get inspired to eat healthier and get back to your neglected exercise routine.
Your first week feels fantastic, and you begin to wonder why you haven’t done this sooner. You begin to feel what it will feel like when you finally put on that beautiful red cocktail dress. You can hear the gossip and the eyes of everyone that will gaze upon you.
Damn, you look good, and at your age too!
The reality is right there before you. You can touch it, feel it, and tango with it. The months and months of work that stand in your way, are totally insignificant, compared to what you feel deep inside, at this very moment.
You can feel the future, and it feels glorious!
Then in a few weeks, you get a cold. Work gets busy. Your kids get a little more whinny. Life begins to hum and grind at a different pace. You begin to forget and project feelings of doubt and failure.
Your future looks truly bleak.
Your cocktail dress is the wrong size anyway. What were you thinking when you bought it in the first place. You should have given it away or donated it, long, long time ago.
You feel like a complete failure. Worse, because you promised yourself the last time, that you would never again get all wrapped up with all this dreaming and living life to the fullest stuff. It leads you to nowhere. It feels awful.
Your genetics are flawed. You lack the necessary time. There is too much stress in your life. Everything you need is always so difficult to behold and it feels like life is working against you.
It is dangerous to feel into the future.
It is dangerous, because neither version of the future is the truth.
Both versions avert our gaze from what is actually important.
In this imaginary scenario, your tenacity and relentless effort to stick to a nutritional plan and continue training for a long time, is what actually matters. You need a matter of years, not a matter of weeks or months.
The danger of projecting our feelings into the future is that we end up paying a heavy price, at some point. We pay heavily when we stop what we are doing and give up. We get crushed when it no longer feels as good as we thought it would, or it doesn’t last as long as we thought it would.
So, keep your feelings in the present.
Begin to think inside your future.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t run before you can crawl. Trust and work the plan. Don’t second guess yourself, or quit. You don’t need to do either.
Feel the present.
Think in the future.
Get to work.
