Live Right Now!

I’m sure that we all do it from time to time:  sit and daydream about having made different choices and having gone a different path in life.  It’s particularly tempting to do this when we are intensely frustrated with something happening at work:  

“If I had only gone to college…”

“If I hadn’t gone to college…”

“If I had pursued different studies…”

How about, “If I had gone a different route I’d be just as frustrated with something along that route!”  Why?  Because we know that pain is a permanent feature of life.

I find myself wishing I hadn’t gone to college after high school and instead pursued being a personal trainer.  In my idealized scenario I would now be working in fitness (with 20+ years of experience) while I pursued writing and youtube on the side.  But here’s the problem, it’s making the mistakes I made and traveling the road I did travel (engineering, the military, then fitness, etc.) that inspired me to start writing in the first place.  As a kid, I hated writing and you would have never told me that one day it would be a passion of mine.  I should add that it’s not just making the mistakes but choosing to learn from mistakes that inspired me to share what I’ve learned.  

Regardless of what path we choose in life, if we don’t pursue wisdom then we will have nothing to share.  It’s that very same wisdom that arrests my daydreaming of different choices made and helps me remember that all that matters is what I choose to do right now.  In focusing on the present, I get the profound opportunity to put in play lessons learned from the past into my present actions.

Learn from your past but live in your present.  There’s a lot of value in today if we focus on it.