Building from Today to Our Best Tomorrow
In my post “A Place of Resort”, I shared a visualization exercise from the works of Susan Anderson. This idea of looking forward to our ideal future is an effective, powerful exercise shared across many therapeutic and spiritual practices. Today, I want to focus on one piece of this exercise that really impacts for good our present circumstances.
Imagine you have carefully and with your heart and spirit drawn up or written out your ideal future. The principles, details, purposes, locations, people and preferences of that future are clear in your mind and heart. Now what? How do you get there? This is the fun part. Choose one element of your ideal future; are you a great cook then but not now? Are you free to pursue creative hobbies you don’t have time now to do but value? Is your career different from the one you have now? Your education level? Your stress, income, happiness level? Starting small, which of all the beautiful things that make up your preferred future could you reasonably begin living today? For example, could you search up a new recipe for this week that is fresh and new? Or choose a day to finally start that jogging routine you’ve had in the back of your mind? Order a paint by number kit, jot down some thoughts for your book, take a look at online education options to further your degree…
Our dream future and our present circumstances can feel so impossibly far from each other. But in reality, that future is much much closer, and much much more possible, than our anxious, discouraged selves may sometimes realize.
Will building our bridge from here to there stretch and challenge us? Absolutely. Will we become discouraged, fatigued and scorned. Maybe most certainly. But like a plant stretching from the dirt to the sky, or a bird struggling to hatch we have so much more waiting for us than the heartaches and losses of our past, or the oppression and struggles of our current day. Will we dare to try? Can we find a friend to cheer us forward? Or look around at other amazing heroes who we can emulate and whose examples and life stories we can hold onto when things DO test our ability to change and grow?
Choose your first building stone, enlist support, celebrate this moment as you begin to bring tomorrow to today.