It's so easy to mull over the past, but the past is just that: history. To the dismay of many, you can't change history as it happened. As an extension, in the 1600s, nostalgia was considered a disease. As humans, it's an emotion everyone feels from time to time, but like many emotions, we become self-obsessed and let the Paleolithic era of our mind get the better of us. How many times have we procrastinated because we didn't feel like doing something in that moment, even when it made absolutely no sense to wait? How many times have we been paralyzed by our thoughts, unable to act because our minds had their inhibitions?
The human mind is better at looking for mistakes and what's wrong over what's right. It's hard for us to be grounded sometimes when we remember when times were better. Sometimes, without realizing it, we create our own nostalgia in different ways, often without realizing it at the time. For example, back in April, I was watching a lot of Clint Eastwood movies with my dad, and that was my first time watching the Dollars Trilogy. Now I look back on April of this year in some ways as a better time (it's also when I started this blog post!), yet this brings me to my next point.
There's a lot of what happened in the past that is preferable to what's happening across our lives today, and yet, even in these times of uncertainty, we still find plenty of nostalgic moments in the contemporary decade. Why? Because it's not about nostalgia, about things 'being better in the past'. The mindset of honing a better day every day has seemed to have faded gradually in the public consciousness, but it's not over yet. There is always something better to come later down the road, and if we're too obsessed with what happened before, then it's impossible to enjoy the small moments that come.
On the flip side of the coin, there's also the prospect of focusing too much on the future. This can be in the form of procrastination, "Oh, I'll just do it later" or thinking that you have an unlimited amount of time to prepare, to sharpen your sword so that it may cut chromium instead of titanium. Like the issues of nostalgia, thinking about what could be also often leads to inaction because it's more comfortable for our minds. When it gives us anxiety to think about something that we do that will take us five minutes with a week deadline, we procrastinate. Why is that? Why do we get anxious and chemically imbalanced when something that's so objectively simple is right in front of us?
I'm guilty of both of these in the past, but I think becoming self-aware of these has helped me reduce nostalgia and anticipation. As cliché as this sounds, you want to take the past as a history lesson, because at the end of the day, that's all it is. The future helps you structure your life, but you shouldn't live in the future as if only one moment twenty years down the line is going to be the only one that matters. The biggest piece of being human is living in the present moment, and as difficult as that is to do for many of us (myself included), you tend to enjoy your life more if you consciously stop yourself, smell the roses, and try to rebalance yourself.
Time will pass anyway, and do we want to spend it thinking about what could've been? No matter how unlimited time seems now, we're all here for a limited time on Earth. We could spend that time doing things that don't matter, such as watching TV, arguing with strangers on the internet, devoting your whole life to a corporation that hardly pays you, scrolling social media endlessly, etc. I'm thankful every day that I have a family I can go back to, a family that I often spend time with because every moment is precious. It's important to maintain your health of your body and your mind.
I've spent a lot of time on my own, and after some intense self-reflection and understanding of myself, understanding myself to such a depth helped me understand other people better as well. You can only know other people as well to a degree as you know yourself, and we all have a misbelief about what we know of ourselves. We have the image, the ego, and the shadow that we ignore. It's important to make friends, to establish good relationships with people, since it's a biological necessity. Just as it's good to learn every single day to keep your mind sharp, it's just as good to consistently work out. Being of sound mind, body, and psychology will usually bring you peace no matter your life stage.
I think the single-most important thing about success is that it's all up to us to be self-aware of how we are. Some of us claim to know who we are, but our shadows tell us a different story. Not everyone is dealt the same hand in life, because if we were, it'd be a boring life. Can you imagine if all of us were the same, if we all thought the same, and did the exact same things? Sure, some things are out of our control, but it's fully within our control to be in control of ourselves. We have to temper ourselves, our expectations, if we plan to be successful. If you set impossible goals, you will never reach them. It's through humility that we thrive.
As a huge believer in individualism and personal liberty, I believe everyone creates their own success. Some of us are lucky, of course, but most people who seek to become successful, to try something different, are the ones who succeed in life. We can't expect life to hand everything; or for that matter, anything to us on a silver platter. We make our own destinies, our own successes, and our own prophecies. If you truly care about something, chase it. What's stopping you? Like characters, we all have our core misbeliefs, and so to question ourselves, our line of thinking, brings us a layer of self-awareness otherwise impossible to assess implicitly. We have to be optimistic, consider our victories where we get them, and as we develop as people, we hope that our victories will be greater and more frequent.
If you believe in yourself to do it, you can. It's that simple. I believe you can do it, because I also believe that I can do it. We're all rather ordinary; but it's the choice to be extraordinary that makes us human.
Until we meet again,
Dustin