As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I started meditating a few times a week (or trying, at least). One of the mediations I have chosen to do involves visualizing your perfect day and ultimately your ideal future.
This is a fairly new concept for me. I am not sure if it is conditioned via my upbringing, cultural, genetic or otherwise, but I have spent the better part of my life planning contingencies for what if things don’t work out – including finding a job, graduate school, saving money, trying to think of every possible objection to a work presentation, having a regular will, having a living will..you get the picture. Maybe this is why I think about death so much! (That’s a “call back” to an earlier blog post for those of you paying attention).
Anyway, I decided as my procrastination de jour today to google “what if things DO work out”. I got a lot of responses back about actual exercise work-outs and then the inevitable “what if things don’t work out”. Even google assumed that I made a spelling error.
Then I tried googling “what if you DO succeed”, “what if you ARE successful”…you get the point. Every time I got back the opposite or in some cases, the pitfalls of actually getting what you want – I guess like that supposed ancient proverb of “be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”
Is it possible that we are all conditioned to focus on the negative and wallow in self-help books, daily motivational quotes and affirmations wherever we can get them to manage the disappointment of simply being human? This seems to me counterproductive to the whole process of progress and innovation.
My whole point is not that it really ultimately matters one way or the other whether things “work out” or not. Some things will. Some things won’t – even when they appear to be skewed one way or the other for you or for others. We never really know what someone wants, needs or gets. We only see what we think they want, need or get.
What I think does matter, at least for me, is that the possibility of something working out really is as good as the possibility of it not working out. I have to remember that. It’s probably not a revelation to a lot of people but it’s not a bad surprise when it does happen.
In the meantime, I have to stop procrastinating and focus more on the other type of “work out”.
Until next time,
Marc