Financial institutions know it: “Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.” And we all know it when it comes to money: anything can happen and send the markets crashing––or rallying.
Why are we then so stubbornly attached to believing that our past is the history of our future? What makes us forget that history can only be written in retrospect? Our Ego, of course: it thinks we need to “learn” from our mistakes to not repeat them, so it has us write mental post-it notes with all our failures and stick them everywhere.
Yesterday, when my son convinced me that carrying the past around was making me suffer, he said something else.
Standing in front of me while I folded my laundry, he said, “I know you’d envisioned beautiful things for the future that then didn’t come to pass, but that doesn’t mean that something beautiful you envision now won’t happen in the future either.”
I put down a folded orange t-shirt, wide-eyed because how could he see inside me so clearly? He continued, “you’re allowed to keep envisioning beautiful things. You don’t need to see only negative things because the past seemed negative.”
I nodded, lowering my gaze to the folded pile of clothes. He then turned around to go play Overwatch.
He was right: I’d allowed my “disappointed dreams” to steal my excitement for life. Dread had replaced it because I assumed that the “negative” things from the past determined how the future would be:
- $100K paid to a defense team that didn’t shield him from injustice
- a felony conviction that’d seemed impossible
- multiple unanswered job applications
- multiple denied rental applications
More deeply, I realized I’d placed my happiness in a future that looked a certain way––I had appointed my “dreams” to give me happiness, forgetting that happiness is an inside job.
So today, I re-commit to emptying myself from the past and continuing to rub my hands in excitement of what’s to come.
What visions for your future will you reclaim from your Ego?
Love,
Carolina
Carolina Perez Sanz 