Exploring the American Wilderness and Other Adventures

Bloganuary 5

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

Yes.

Just kidding, that’s not an answer, silly.

I do not spend much time in the past. My brain has responded to a lot of the trauma by blocking it out, so there’s not a lot of history I can reach without voluntarily going into it, which I don’t imagine will happen any time soon.

When I first got sick, I did sit in the past a little bit. I had a cycle of thoughts about how I had gone through this and had gone through that and NOW I am going through cancer. Additionally, I spent a lot of time sitting with thoughts about how I used to be able to do this amazing physical thing and that amazing physical thing and now I just get to watch life go by in a sick body.

Settling my thoughts in the past was only harmful. Thankfully, through therapy and a great support system I am able to work on letting all of that go.

On the other side, I’ve always had difficulty NOT focusing my thoughts on the future. Future plans were just always so exciting to me. I am a huge planner – I use a digital planner as well as a paper planner. I count down to everything, I have systems in place to track everything, and then more.

Through therapy, I’ve learned quite well that through those satisfying behaviors of planning for the future, I’m not allowing myself to appreciate the present. The present, mind you, that at one point was the future I was so excited about.

I have been working pretty hard on that. Cancer has helped. The conversations about learning how to be more present brought to light how much disappointment I’ve been facing. There have been countless events I’ve planned or committed to in advance and then when the time arrived I was fighting symptoms so badly that I didn’t get to have the experience I’d been anticipating.

So. I spend more time thinking about the present. Or so I thought. We are moving to the opposite coast soon. We have to find a new house. We have to quit our jobs. We need to say goodbye to our family and friends. We need to make new friends. We have to plan our drive across the country. And we don’t know when. The when depends upon the government processing paperwork. We could get a call tomorrow saying we need to be there February 1st. We could get a call February 1st saying we need to be there in June. NOW I know what it is to live in the present moment. It is nearly painful to have an entire year in front of me and not have anything on it except birthdays. Instead of planning out my life in detail, I have a year of blank pages.

Blank pages. Thinking about that creates a different excitement. I’m here for it.