Readings : About the Future

posted in: Presence, Zoon Cards | 0

In my readings and session work, there isn’t much emphasis on “the future”. The reason for this is that “the future” is that is, in reality, a fantasy. It’s an imaginary idea about “how things should be”. Focusing on this fantasy causes people to fixate on it instead of being present, where real life is.

This fiction we call “future” can be the source of a lot of anxiety. We get caught up in “how things should be” instead of how they are or, more harmfully, “who I should be” instead of the role I’m playing in my life RIGHT NOW.

In life, you don’t eat food before its grown. You can’t make a meal without getting the groceries first. So there is some sense of timing, some sense of order. Having intent can include the past (primarily letting go of it because it isn’t real either) and it can include the future, because visualizing some sort of outcome can be helpful in constructing it. You don’t want to build a house without a plan.

But life is a lot more slippery than that, as any contractor will tell you. Life is much more of an art than a recipe.

With Art, a truly great idea plops in from a mysterious place and the Artist is left to interpret it, to make sense of it, and to make it real. Surely, there’s some planning involved, but quite a lot of it revolves around what steps you are taking right now to chip away at that stone until it is a statue. Often the most important parts of making great Art are the “happy accidents” and deviations from our visions. The journey is where the magic happens, not in the past or the destination — until you get to it. Then destinations can be fun.

The steps you take on the work of art you call your life happen right now and are much closer to Improv than they are to following a cookie recipe you found online. The great magic of life mostly works this way and that’s why my Readings and Sessions are primarily focused on what you’re doing now, or pretty close to now. It isn’t that I can’t tell you the future. It is that, most of the time, I won’t without a good reason.

Giving you a rough idea of where you might be heading is a lot more helpful than giving you a firm insight into what your likely future holds. Giving you this kind of insight can hurt you more than help you. You might steer too hard toward it and miss the magical moments that could have, quite surprisingly, got you “there”. You might miss the magical missteps and experiments that gave you the knowledge and skills you needed to “succeed”. In effect, too much “solid” information can harm you more than help you most of the time.

It is true that a “vision” of “the future” can inspire you or lead you somewhere, but it’s quite likely that this “vision” might be false; it was something to nudge you in a new direction and break you out of your old habits, patterns, and ruts.

Finding your own way in your own time is one of the secret ingredients to living a great life.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have some help. We all feel lost and confused sometimes. It’s ok.

Truly growing means being open and willing to truly change. To evolve. Like the evolution of species, personal transformation and growth is rarely speedy. It’s much more often a series of steps with a few thrilling speedy moments mixed in to keep it interesting. In that way, life is like a novel, being written in the moment, by you. Part of how this novel plays out is directly up to you. How you read and interpret it is entirely up to you. The tricky part is that how you read and interpret it directly affects and inspires the part that seems to be “not up to you” (basically, nearly the whole thing is ultimately up to you, just with the steps of engaging life itself, vital lessons you need to grow in your unique work of art, and it’s fascinating X-Factor mixed in).

In short, I don’t focus too hard on “the future” because “the future” tends to play out according to what steps you’re taking and what seeds you’re planting right now. I’m more interesting in helping you with that.