Mind the GAP!

Our minds are annoyingly superb at creating a gap between the ‘here and now’ and the sparkling excitement of what we think the future will deliver.

Sometimes the gap actually feels more like bottomless crevasse, which we tumble into, full of disappointment, again, that an event or material object did not deliver the happiness and contentment that we had imagined.

People say it’s good to have something to look forward to and that it’s OK to be excited about the future. Practically speaking (and working with the law of attraction) it would seem more helpful to be optimistic and hopeful about the future, rather than pessimistic and fearful, but there is still a danger of creating and then falling into the gap, because ‘looking forwards’ means we forget to be ‘looking around’ at where we are right now.

I am starting to slowly realise that the less excited I am about a future event or new material possession, the more enjoyable the actual experience is when it happens, if it happens at all!!

So the really good news is that the gap is just an illusion. When we stand back from this imagined gap and see what our Ego-mind is doing, the game starts to be up and it’s time to laugh at what a mess we got ourselves in!

Using the metaphor of those poor donkeys on Blackpool beach, the happy carrot of the future, stuck at the end of the stick of linear time, dissolves in the peace of the present moment! Which means you can enjoy the happy carrot NOW!

And now for the shocking news: the future doesn’t actually exist...

This sounds like a statement full of doom, but it’s actually a very liberating thought. You can describe to me what you think the future will bring, but none of us really have a clue what will happen from breath to breath. It’s only our past which we project into this concept called ‘the future’.

We only ever live in the now, in the present moment. When we think about the future, guess what, we do this in the now! It makes me giggle as I write this :) This also means that the past is also being experienced in the now, even if if feels like it's still happening!

So I am learning to ‘Mind the Gap’ but it’s an on-going process, because it’s so conditioned into our minds.

I want to finish this piece with some wise advice I received yesterday:

“Don’t decide what things should be. Be in the moment. Let yourself be taught by the moment you are living in.

The prescriptive nature of mankind is actually outlining a future that is much lower than could be available to it.

On the individual level, you do the same thing. ‘I expect to be here by tomorrow’, decides were you may be tomorrow at the cost of being some place else that maybe much more interesting.”

So I am planning to spend less time falling in the gap looking forwards and spend more time just looking around :)

(Did you spot the ‘gap’ in that last sentence? ‘Planning to’ means going to do it in the future!! That ‘gap’ is so sneaky! So let me rephrase the last sentence:

So I am now spending less time in the gap. I am not now looking forwards and I am now just looking around!