Here’s some very good news about your future:

I have no fucking clue what it looks like.

And you don’t either, even if you think you do.

Cool, right!

No?

Okay, okay, we’ll take a look at how that notion can be extremely liberating.

Let’s introduce a person who’s been experiencing a lot of problems, confusion, and disturbing emotions.

We’re in a conversation and they mention their absolute dread and hopelessness.

Very often I hear about this immense fear they have, this disturbing idea, that the future will be nothing but a painful repetition of what has been going on so far.

For the mind this makes total sense: if stuff has happened before, if experiences have been a specific way, they’ll obviously repeat themselves.

The mind just projects stuff into an unknown dimension (which is what the future actually is) and uses what it already knows to make that happen.

So in effect, you end up with an endless row of the exact same days, the same images, and they create the debilitating negative feeling you have around your future.

Your future now IS that.

An unclimbable mountain of ‘been there, done that’.

But life doesn’t necessarily work like that.

There’s a powerful, beautiful, and very natural way out.

What we don’t realize (and what the mind can never really grasp), is that we can have a completely different experience of the exact same situation.

Literally nothing has to change in your outside circumstances for you to have a totally different appreciation of what’s going on.

So instead of going through the motions for the rest of your life, because you’re living in the same place with the same partner and the same job, you’ll start living a different life because your perspective changes.

And that changes the way you feel about things, even the most mundane and boring and well-known things.

It’s like the most brilliant shortcut.

The best way to explain that phenomenon is to compare it with falling in love.

Can you remember how that was, or are you living it right now?

For most people being in love means arriving at life from a completely different, magically elevated level.

It’s as if you infect everything around you with your optimism, your joy, and your unbreakably good mood.

All of a sudden the rain that you normally despise is totally fine, the people you normally steer away from are now regarded with compassion, and wherever you go, you tend to see good, positive stuff going on.

It’s like all of a sudden the sun is shining from within and you’re spreading that light all around you.

Literally NOTHING in your outer circumstances has to change in order for you to feel absolutely great, because your amazing feelings are rock solid from within.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

That’s extremely powerful and hopeful.

It means that the predictions from your mind can be seen through and regarded as nothing but mathematical, uncreative attempts at holding on to a pattern.

It also means that you can learn to see through the dreary, problematic vision your thoughts compose all the time.

Because if the mind was really right, if the only way for you to have a good life would be for everything around you to change, this would be indeed extremely disempowering.

If you feel like shit (and especially if you have been feeling like shit for a while) and the mind tells you ‘the future will be a carbon copy of this because these feelings are caused by your circumstances’, things become almost unbearable.

And your future looks like nothing but the same dark, useless shit.

That makes sense, but only if you don’t know better.

Again: life doesn’t have to work that way.

The fact that the mind comes up with stories about the future, whether that’s ten minutes from now or five years from this moment, doesn’t make them true.

If your perception changes, just like when you are in love, your sense of being alive changes, and you’ll go through completely new levels of contentment and satisfaction and curiosity.

There’s so much potential in this realization, even though it can be hard to comprehend when you’re in a dark place and used to feeling like crap.

But that still doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

The crap is caused by the same mind that has told you all the fucked up stories that brought you where you are, and now it also pretends to know what will happen tomorrow.

Really?

How?

How would this inventive but predictable thought factory know what will happen in the world even a second from now?

It can’t.

It’s a bluff.

It’s bullshit.

And that’s why I’ve noticed many instances where people saw their views on every element of life change for the better, because their inner appreciation changed.

From inside, to outside.

Their lives changed, but not because their lives changed.

They just came from a radically different, internal position.

By the way: I’m not denying the impact of (apparent) circumstances, and the necessity of certain basics.

It’s just that most of those are way less crucial than we perceive them to be.

And when your perspective changes, when you’re starting to fall in love with life, it almost always happens that you’ll see way more options and opportunities and chances and blessings than you saw before.

The world you live in can change profoundly if your consciousness shifts, if you stumble across that innate happiness and trust and clarity that we’re all born with, and take that into your daily experience.

And that’s a whole lot less work than changing every single element of your world, which seems to be the only solution according to your mind.

Just be aware of this:

Thinking about the future is not the same as seeing the future.

And even getting the tiniest glimpse of how this works, the smallest hint of your natural capacity to love for love’s sake, can open up the darkness and invite a bit of light.

Right now, I don’t know what this will mean for you.

But it might just change everything.

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(Photo by @dewang, for Unsplash)