CREATING THE FUTURE
THE SECRET TO LAYING THE FOUNDATION OF A MEANINGFUL AND PURPOSEFUL LIFE
Out of the blue recently, I received a wonderful communication from a younger friend in Germany. We had met when she was travelling in 2000 with her partner in Central Australia and I was their guide. Then I was training guides and touring in both Central and Northern Australia.
I would often find myself in deep conversation with people from all over the world especially when seated around a camp fire late in the evening under the most amazing star-blanketed night sky.
She wrote that as we had sat talking quietly as the others slept, I had asked her how she wanted to be at 50, (she was 30 at that time). She said that later, when she was alone, she had written a letter to herself and that a couple of weeks ago she had found her diary from that time and the letter.
Many of the things that she had written from that time had come to fruition.
That got me to thinking about that process of creating our own future and how once we create the projection strongly enough the path to that outcome shapes itself often driven from the subconscious.
John Schaar quotes, “The future is not some place we are going, it is one we are creating. The paths are not to be found but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination”. How do we do that? She wrote herself a letter and had put it away however that was powerful enough that even though she wasn’t conscious that the choices she was making were taking her to the destination she arrived at, once discovered the realisation was clear.
If you were wanting to explore more, there is a book on the subject The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. There are two premises; life is composed as a story where everything is invented and with new definitions much more is possible than we think.
Much of creating the future means challenging our current paradigm. Reframing ourself or asking a different question to recognise the assumption we are making that we are not even aware of that creates our constraints and limits what we then see of our future. For my lovely German friend and her partner, that possible future created back then includes spending months each year in the Russian wilderness looking after the wolves in a particular area of the forests and being engaged in the Siberian Tiger Project. So, if everything is invented then everything is possible. If you are willing to take the challenge then write your future self a letter, one based in your own values, ethics and strengths and see where that future may take you.