Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 109
A friend of mine died yesterday morning, and I've been facing a lot of changes in my personal life. And as is quite common for me at the moment, I've been thinking a lot about the future.
And it occurred to me that although we spend quite a lot of time talking about goals or things we'd like to achieve, I wonder what your thoughts are, I was contemplating what my thoughts were about wiping the whole slate clean. And by that I mean rather than gauging your life by all of the things that you have done, all of the people that you've loved, all of the places that you've been, all of those dreams that are quite retrospective, a sort of accumulation of the life that has been lived, it can feel quite daunting to look to the future and wonder what else could be possible from here, because frankly, most of us are quite tired.
And I was contemplating this morning, if you had the chance, would you do it all again? And I don't mean that necessarily in a kind of 'Quantum Leap' style or in a 'It's a wonderful life' style, but maybe that in a way of, if you got the chance to meet a whole new friendship group, travel to a whole load new places, fall in love with a whole load of new people, try a whole load of different food. If you could start not from the beginning, so you needed to learn to walk again, you needed to learn how to tie shoelaces again and all of that stuff. But from the now you, as the person that you are today, with all of the things that you've learned along the way, would you choose to have another go at it? To make a whole load of new connections with people, to see a whole load new things, to write a whole load of new stories and new experiences?
Because the truth is that, we have a choice and a chance to do that every day if we want to. And it doesn't necessarily have to be as drastic as wiping the whole thing out, to be able to start again. But in a way, we do have a chance to reinvent ourselves every morning. We do have a chance to be able to look at the world with fresh eyes, and we do have a chance to start from exactly where we're standing, rather than see ourselves as standing on top of all of the things that we've done.
I think sometimes when things can feel really tricky, that idea of "I could start from here" can be extremely liberating. And I've always loved the phrase that "you have not even met all of the people that you're going to love in your life yet". There are incredible things ahead for all of us. And sometimes, and oftentimes from where we're stood right now, it can be really hard to see what a future could look like when we're constantly looking over our shoulder.
But maybe we don't need to know what it looks like. Maybe just having the open-heartedness to be willing to experience more of what life offers is enough to start building a brand-new future.
I hope that this gives you some inspiration if goals feel a bit tricky, or sometimes the future can feel a bit messy, that we are the creators of our own story.
I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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