The Unknown Future
There is something that happens when we contemplate the unknown or even partially known future – we question our power to control it. We question the risk to ourselves. And then we try to find ways to get some control over things.
When I first started healing, I intuitively understood that one of the intentions of my path was to make me “fearless” in many ways. I would no longer be scared of my experience – past, present, or future. That’s happened. I’m not scared of nothing anymore. But what I didn’t expect was that life would offer me cliffs with no safety nets, with the very unique expectation that I would simply dive in head first and not really think about it or worry about it too much, that I wouldn’t change direction because of it.
When the unknown future presents the possibility that there may be some cliff jumping involved, that often changes the path people take. They go in a different direction because of the perception of risk that comes into play. I don’t think that most people have a healing journey that includes becoming fearless in this way. But, if they did, it would be life-changing for them. Or maybe they do and they just avoid it the entire time because of the fear of it.
So many people give up on their dreams because of the fear of “what if”, because of the fear of the cliff with no safety net. Often that presents as a choice between money and happiness. I can do what I want and be happy, but I’ll probably be broke. Or I can get a job that I don’t like and give up being happy, but at least I’ll have money in the bank. The world offers this false choice all the time.
Really, the question is only – how fearless are you? How much risk can you tolerate? How much mental and emotional control over yourself do you have in the experience?
Master yourself in the experience without changing the experience.
When you’re faced with that perceived risk or that false choice, aka the cliff jump, to allow the experience to move forward you have to be able to manage yourself in the experience without trying to change the experience or the direction you’re going in. You have to be willing to jump. You can’t avoid the cliff. That’s no easy feat.
Fear is going to tell you a story about all the things that could go wrong. Potentially you also have people around you that are projecting their own fear at you. You have all of that happening while you’re trying to talk yourself into jumping off a cliff without knowing what will happen next.
Do accept the challenge? Can you manage yourself within that experience in such a way that you don’t cave into the fear of others? Can you stay the course?
I’ve personally had a lot of practice at this. Life offered it to me in spades over and over again. I sat in the fear, waited for the experience to pass, and then looked around and questioned what happened. Am I still here? Any broken bones? What actually happened? How far off was the experience from what I was afraid of in my head? Did it work out? Was the story of the mind true? Where would I be if I hadn’t done it the way I did it?
Let’s be real for a second – it’s not always going to work out. You can jump off the cliff and hit the rocks. That means you have to be able to do one thing – trust yourself to handle what happens next. If you trust yourself, then it doesn’t matter what life throws at you, you’ll be okay.
You can manage yourself within the experience because you trust yourself to handle the experience.
You don’t need to change the experience because you trust yourself to handle it and you understand that you don’t have control over it anyway.
All you do is manage your thoughts and feelings – self-mastery is internal power and control not external power and control.
Your point of control is always within yourself. It’s not out there in the world.
These are the fundamental things that allow you to accept the unknown future and keep going anyway. Learn to recognize the fear when it shows up.
How do you do that? Question the story you’re telling yourself? What’s the root cause of the feeling you’re having?
You see, I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m burnt out. But it’s not really burn out. That feeling turned into a bit of frustration. Then as I continued to question that, I realized I was offering myself the false choice between money and happiness. Then as I continued to question that I understood that it was my fear of the partially known and unknown future that was actually getting my way.
If you stay there, you don’t argue with it, you don’t force it, and you just keep trying to understand it, eventually you will find the truth of the story you’re telling yourself.
Crying it out doesn’t work. Wallowing in it doesn’t work. Acceptance allows you to question it so you don’t fight with it. When you don’t fight with it, that gives you the ability to do the work to understand it. Once you understand it then you can offer yourself the ability to work through the fear. That allows you to deal with whatever the insecurity is that you’re feeling. Now you can stay the course.
Me and fear are friends. It likes to remind me that it’s hanging out back there sometimes because it wants to be acknowledged. I’m okay with that. So when it comes out of the shadows to play, I go along with it. I play with the fear. Some people call it playing with fire. For me, it’s just playing cards with an old friend.
Fear will always be part of the experience. We’re not trying to evict it. We’re learning how to work with it. By learning how to work with it, we learn to accept that it will be present, that it will show up in disguise, and that we can manage it when we realize what it is and why it’s there.
The thing we don’t do is try to change the experience. When we question the experience it just offers us the fear back. That’s the reflection of the experience until we can see the fear in the reflection. Remember that fun house mirror? Well, here it is. This is an example of the warped reflection we get when we haven’t done in our own internal questioning before we look out into the world. To see the world clearly, you have to clarify your own perception before you look around, otherwise what you get back will be warped.
The unknown future only presents a problem because of the fear of it. Just recognize your own ability to manage your fear. You don’t have to be scared of what might happen next. You just have to trust yourself.
How do you do that? Take a few leaps and see how you manage them. Allow life to happen and see how you handle it. Do that without running the story that says things need to work out the way I want them to in order for me to trust myself because that story isn’t true. It makes the experience responsible for how you feel about yourself. That’s a great way to feel like crap on a regular basis.
Life isn’t going to always work out the way you want it to. You can’t control that so you have to find a way to trust yourself to handle what happens next without hinging that on a given outcome. That separates you from the experience just enough that you don’t beat yourself up for what’s happening around you. Taking responsibility for your life doesn’t mean having control over everything nor does it mean beating yourself up for what you don’t have control over.
Learning to trust yourself to handle an unknown future isn’t easy. Step one is recognizing the fear of that unknown future and the story it creates. Manage the story then release the fear. That will allow you to see the world more clearly, while learning to stay the course so that you can keep following your heart, knowing you’re taking your brain with you.
Love to all.
Della
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