What to Do When the Future Slips Through Your Fingers

(Let it Go.)

It is a disorienting time to be a human. Much of what we have taken for granted about the larger world is being unraveled faster than we can gather up the threads. The macro dissolving in on itself, the crumbling of what we thought was a solid foundation is no different, really, than what often happens in our own lives.

The truth is we cannot know the future. The future is simply made up of probabilities. When it becomes the now, and it looks different than our images of it, that is just a form of disillusionment. Our images of the future are always illusions. Because we haven’t been there yet. Pretty much every time I have ever tried to imagine what some event or party is going to be like. I am wrong.

We can’t help ourselves though. Because so much of life requires some kind of planning. The planning allows us to work on our sea legs. It provides some basic strength or skills that allow us to navigate the reality of it that doesn’t look like we planned. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes we plan things or want things that don’t end up happening at all. And our minds are not very well equipped to handle that.

I find that when I really want something, I tend to push it away from me somehow. Alan Watts talks about how the world teaches us to grip tightly, to plan, to shape our lives with force. And that if we don’t exert this kind of will over our lives, everything will fall apart.

And yet, our experience of life is usually not that at all. Usually, the more we try to control something, the more it slips through our fingers. The more we try to hold on to something, the more likely we are to lose it. And yet, it is part of our human curse, that we will keep doing just that.

The truth remains that when we move with ease and unattachment, life moves with us. Things fall into place. As Watts also reminds us, a river does not struggle to reach the ocean. It does not argue with the rocks in its path. It does not question whether it will make it to its destination. And in doing so, it carves mountains and nourishes everything in its path.

I return again and again to Rumi: When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain.

Once again, letting go seems to be the answer. I am not saying to not have goals or plans or ideas or dreams. Or to not pursue those things. I am just saying that the more lighthearted we can be along the way, the gentler we can hold our desires, the more likely it is those desires will come to fruition (probably just not how we first envisioned). And also, the more likely we are to live a fulfilling life along the way.