Am I scared of my future?

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There have been many times when I’ve felt overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness and desperate to feel some type of control.
There have also been times when I’ve asked people for their opinions and then felt unsatisfied until I heard exactly what I wanted to hear.

There have been times when I’ve made assumptions about negative things to come and then obsessed over what I could do to prevent it, or what I should have done to avoid it.

In retrospect, everything is always worse at 2am or when I have worried myself literally sick.  All this mental brain work does very little to change what was to come.  It wasn’t even slightly useful or productive, and it definitely didn’t soften the blow if my fears came true and something went wrong or didn’t pan out.

In fact, my sleepless nights worrying or making myself literally sick only ever exacerbated the situation, because worrying essentially began the disappointment retroactively.

The famous nun, I mention a lot in my posts Sister Anne always said that when you worry and nothing’s wrong, you’ve wasted precious time over nothing. If you worry and something is wrong, you’ve still wasted precious time.

I believe that every time we use the present to stress about the future, we are choosing to sacrifice joy today to mourn joy we may not have tomorrow.

To me, it seems that we often create solutions or somehow protect ourselves from pain, but in all reality, we are just causing ourselves more.  Personally, I think that I need to start to challenge the fear that I feel when I start thinking about uncertainty.  
When I look back at the most fulfilling parts of my life, I realize most of them took me completely by surprise.

I may not have gotten everything I wanted, but I’ve wanted what I’ve gotten more than often enough to compensate. The unknown may have provided some heartache, but it’s also provided adventure and excitement for me.

The times that I’ve felt disappointed, there’s been another moment when I’ve felt a sense of wonder. Those are the moments I truly live for, when all of a sudden I can see the world through new eyes in a way I could never have known to predict.

It would be easy to say that mindfulness is the answer to worrying. I believe it is human to fixate sometimes on what might be to come, my ideal solution would be a combination of being in the moment and trusting in the ones to follow.  I know that I cannot control what the future will look like, but I do know that it will lead to something worthwhile if I remain open minded.  It's taken me a long time to stop overwhelming myself with what-ifs and worst case scenarios. 

On the flip side of all my worry is trust.  I know that I cannot always trust in the specifics but I know that I continually trust in myself. 




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