I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-Albert Einstein
The eternal question that bothers most of us each day is what’s going to happen tomorrow? The innate human need to find surety and definite-ness in each and everything can be quite overwhelming to say the least. So much time is spent in worrying about the future that sometimes the present is allowed to go to hell. At times we tend to judge all our actions with their repercussions in mind, as in how will it affect our future state of being.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that one shouldn’t worry about what lies ahead.That IS a necessity. One should always keep the future target in mind and plan accordingly. Our present actions and thoughts should have an orientation towards a better tomorrow. But the trick i guess is NOT to let the fear of tomorrow cripple the present.
What prompted me to think in this direction is the fact that almost halfway through the graduation, the perennial question I have to face (whether I like it or not!) is, WHAT NOW?
Every where i go, almost everyone i meet has the same question to ask, about what I intend to do about MY future. Whether its the cheap voyeuristic pleasure people derive from peeping into others’ lives [:P] or a sign (from whom, i wonder!) that I need to start thinking about what lies ahead, i think when it comes to the future I should have to sets of distinct goals, namely the short term and the long term. I guess such a classification will go a long way in simplifying the whole thing.
My preoccupation is with where I would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to a large extent, the future is created by what we do now. Now is the only time in which we can act. Therefore, our future state will be more a product of what we do now than of what is done to us.
If we don't know what state we would be in right now if we could be in whatever state we wanted, how can we possibly know in what state we would like to be in the future? Furthermore, any thought of where we want to be in the future is usually based on forecasts of what the future will be. Such forecasts are inevitably wrong; we cannot identify all the significant changes that will occur in our environments between now and then. It is for this reason that so many plans are never completely implemented; they are dropped when it becomes apparent that the forecasts on which they are based are false.
Nevertheless, it is apparent that our current decisions are based on what we expect the relevant future to be. But this should not be based on forecasts; it should be based on assumptions.People normally mistake assumptions to be nothing but forecasts in disguise.They could not be more wrong. For example, we carry a spare tire in our cars because we assume a flat tire is possible, not because we forecast that one is going to occur on our next trip. Forecasts are about probabilities; assumptions are about possibilities.
John M. Richardson Jr. once famously remarked,
“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”
Thats where the big difference lies. Not lying in the first or the last bracket, not to give into some false highly romantic (or gloomy for that matter) notion of what tomorrow is going to bring but taking a positive and self-affirming step towards it. Because in the end the ONLY thing you can count on to help you tide through the murky waters that lay ahead, is your own INDIVIDUAL self and the belief in the actions you take.
