How much of your time do you spend thinking about what has already happened or what is going to happen? In other words, how much time do you spend thinking about the past or the future?
If you’re anything like me, it’s probably quite a bit. In fact, even now in this moment (I just took a pause for a few minutes), I am surprised just how much of my time is spent replaying the past or future-tripping. It’s A LOT!!!
While it’s natural for us to spend much of our precious time thinking about the past and the future, it is also where our energy goes. Just as our time is finite, so too is our energy. And both are precious resources.
And, while it may just be my way of framing things, I see our energy as more precious than the time we have. Or, perhaps another way of saying it would be: we have more time than we have energy, thus where that energy goes matters greatly.
We often hear people talk about how precious and fleeting our time is, but not so much about where our energy is going during that time. [Ok, I’m headed down a rabbit hole of semantics that is probably just not useful. I’ll quit chasing my tail and get to the point 😉 ].
We will always spend some of our time thinking about the past and the future, but what might it look like to reclaim, for the present, even a small amount of that energy?
Learning from the past and planning for the future is wonderful and important, and perhaps you want to accept this prompt to be aware for even just a day (or an hour) of how often:
- you worry about how you said something and wish you could have said it differently?
- you replay what you didn’t do and wish you would have done?
- you create a story about what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s meeting?
- you tell yourself that if you were _______ you would have done it better?
- and, the list could go on and on.
Is your energy stuck in the past?
Is it stuck in the future?
What is here today, in this moment, that needs and wants your energy?
Your wonderful life is here right now, in this moment. The choices you make now about where your energy goes are the choices that are going to allow you to live fully in the present and set up the future you most want.