I spend many of the 24 hours that exist in one day living inside the thoughts and scenarios in my own head.
It's something I write in my New Year's Resolutions every year to change. It taunts me, year after year when I write it down in my diary but never seem to accomplish it.
"Spend less time thinking about the future and more time existing in the present moment"
I don't consciously do this. It's been subtly ingrained in my daily behaviors and practices, so much that I don't even notice it's happening.
It's midday on Wednesday thinking out loud about what the workday looks like tomorrow. It's writing down everything I need to do the next day the night before. It's meticulously checking the weather on a Sunday to plan out my workouts for the week and feeling stressed if things have to change. It's existing where some days before midday I'm already thinking about tomorrow, and the rest of the week and the rest of the month.
And it's easy for all of this to be seen as really positive, a really good trait to be so disciplined. And to some extent it is, but not when being organized becomes an excuse to forego living in the current moment in your current state and instead constantly be thinking about what comes next.
Because what comes next sounds like an innocuous phrase but truthfully, for me, it isn't.
What comes next are the words spiralling in my brain late at night when I can't sleep properly because I can't shut off. It's the words drifting on my screen when I'm trying to do something at work but keep thinking about the other task I need to do in an hour or what I have to get done after work. It's the anxious part of my mind shooting off questions at an unimaginable pace. What about tomorrow? What if you did this, what happens? How would that scenario play out? How would things change? The lives I've lived in my own head are endless.
And when everything becomes looking towards the next day or week or month or year everything becomes exhausting.
And I have to actively pull myself back from that. Have days that I don't plan out the night before, not have a schedule.
Have to actively lean into the discomfort and tightening in my chest I feel when I don't have a set plan. Something I've relied on as somewhat of a crutch and a lifeline in the past year when everything was so unknown and learning that moving away from that is sometimes not only a good but actually a great thing to do.
And it's uncomfortable.
But it reminds me to exist right now, not tomorrow, not a year from now but right now. That as much as I'd like to, I can't predict the future and the four scenarios I've made up probably won't end up happening because truly anything can happen.
And that I control my thoughts, they don't control me.
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