We can’t escape our current life experience.
This is, of course, always true.
Our life takes place in the present, always. We can’t quit the current version of our life, we can’t jump back into the past or forward into the future.
We all know that but just now – in the middle of a worldwide pandemic – we can easily feel tempted to put all our expectations and hopes into the future.
We think, ‘I’ll do that, stop this, decide about that, think about this, etc. when things got better again or back to normal’.
But life is happening now and here. It’s not on the other side of self isolation. We can’t put it on hold for a couple of months.
Waiting for other/better times
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- can prevent us from trying to make the present better,
- will make us feel stuck, and helpless in the here and now,
- may hold us back from actively taking control of what we can influence and create right now,
- can mean that we overlook new opportunities the current version of our life is offering to us.
So it seems to be a good idea to remind ourselves that we don’t have to wait for things to become better in order to love and fully live our current life.
What can we do to fully live our life in the present, in the here and now?
Some suggestions:
- We can do a little thought experiment: What if the now was the normal?
What if our current life was our normal life? What would we be doing then?
What would we gratefully appreciate – all the good things that we have in our life right now, all the people, experiences, circumstances that are so precious to us?
What would we no longer accept as a given, what would we try to change to the better?
What would we do to contribute and to make the current world a better place?
If we intentionally decide to accept that the now is the normal – how do we want to think, feel and act in the current period of our life?
And, based on that decision: Does anything come up to mind that we can start to handle differently/better, right here and now?
- We can ask ourselves questions about our values and our purpose. And answer them.
As we are currently more concerned about life, health and even death than we normally are, deeper questions about our life and ourselves might come up in our mind.
Instead of pushing away these potentially unsettling questions, we can deliberately decide to find our very personal answers to them.
Defining our values and our purpose in life can give our mind and our soul structure, stability and direction.
We can ask ourselves questions like these:
‘What is really important to me in the different areas of my life?
Am I currently neglecting important values and principles?
What do I want to achieve in my life, today and tomorrow?
Where do I want to focus my time and my energy?
Etc.’
And then we can use our answers to now truly ‘value our values’:
How can we pay more attention to what’s important to us in our daily life?
Could we start a new personal or professional development project, here and now, that’s closely linked to our values and our goals?
- We can actively take control of those areas in our lives that are within our power.
There is a lot we can do to feel active, powerful, and in control right now, in our private environment:
Activities such as decluttering and organising our belongings (READ MORE HERE), conducting home repairs or deep cleans, sorting through boxes of old photos, cleaning our digital files, clearing up the backyard or garden, etc.
The experience that we can sort things out, that we can create visible results and improvements, helps us to see that we in fact can change our current reality to the better. This in turn helps us find more calmness and peace.
Thus, let’s ask ourselves: What’s the most urgent home-improvement project? What can I do to get started, here and now?