Gazing in the Mirror

February 20 - Enabling The Future

Courage and cheerfulness will
not only carry you over the
rough places in life, but will
enable you to bring comfort and
help to the weak-hearted and
will console you in the sad hours.
~ William Osler

We have to provide within ourselves
a mental and spiritual likeness for
the thing desired . . . Whatever is
imaged is brought forth from mind
into manifestation.
~ Ernest Holmes, Creative Mind

Ever since Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now, a foundational tenet for many "New Thought" pathways has been to be attentive to the present moment and that is useful advice. We cannot live in the past though we can learn from it or occasionally revisit fond memories. We cannot predict the future so worrying about what might or might not happen is a waste of emotional energy. However there is an aspect of metaphysics that does touch upon future events and which is somewhat important as well. It is enabling of one who practices it to set an intended destination for their own self and thereby enable the future to unfold in that direction. With a destination in mind, we can navigate the waters of the present moment, even if the circumstances we encounter cause a course correction or lead us to ultimately abandon that particular destination. The journey is what matters the most.

At the time I originally wrote this essay, I had recently had the deeply satisfying opportunity to visit members of my biological family as all of them live at some significant distance from me. In order to get my "current/immediate" family to go along with my personal needs, it was necessary to sweeten the pot for them with additional adventures during the journey. My mother was worrying me quite a bit about what she perceived as my father's declining condition. The messages had taken on some urgency in the months before we decided to make the trip. It certainly was time that I made a visit. It had been 4 years since I had last been physically present with any of my loved ones and in regards to my youngest sister (who had caused no small amount of worrying in me on behalf of her well-being in previous years) it had been a whole decade since I had been physically present with her.

So for over a year making this visit had been planned and that enabled this future event to take place. The first attempt to fulfill the plan failed when the economic situation simply prohibited even the shortest, most direct of visits to occur. Then certain ongoing projects and preferences continued to present obstacles to the actual fulfillment of the plan to visit my family. Finally the projects went into a pause and the funds were finally present but the holidays loomed upon us. Though we have made such visits during such time periods before, having been there and done that, I wanted to "wait". So there ensued a definite plan and time frame to travel after the holidays.

My daughter and grandchildren began to also make similar plans, partly because of concerns regarding my dad and partly because her own dad was recently widowed and not doing all that well with his own health. Therefore, my daughter had double the reasons to visit the area. For a long time, I was putting a lot of effort into "making" it a collective visit to my parents. I envisioned something like a grand family reunion. There was an efficiency in such a plan as I could get two separate family visits out of the way in one time frame. However the logistics of making that happen turned out to be too difficult as indicated to me by my daughter's plans going on and off and on again. There were also issues regarding my own family's preferred speed of travel and trying to force any kind of exact timing began to appear insane for me to expect. So I surrendered to what is.

My family changed our own travel plans significantly. Initially, we were planning to head to the Texas and New Mexico first, but we decided to head north towards South Dakota first and end up in the New Mexico and Texas areas at the end of our journey. My daughter and grandchildren did end up fulfilling their travel plans between Christmas and New Year's, while the grandkids were on a natural vacation period from their usual school routines. My family left home a couple of days after Christmas and enjoyed the kind of leisurely travel that we prefer with no real schedule for getting anywhere but some intended waypoints along our proposed route.

We made course corrections along the way. First, we realized that our route would miss The Badlands and in response turned our path more directly north to arrive there in time for New Year's. Then we followed for awhile a route that my husband's father had traveled in young adulthood so that he was eventually standing on top of Mount Rushmore while that monument was yet under construction. From there our path intersected another family journey to Yellowstone that my husband's uncle had made in the 1930s. However because we were traveling in winter and their two separate travels were in summer, we ultimately had a significant detour and a novel form of transportation in order to actually go into Yellowstone. This was a park that I had also visited in the summertime when I was 12. We did finally make it to New Mexico (after my middle sister had also been convinced by our mom's worrying to spend a week there in mid-January). I found my parents actually managing the challenges of aging quite well and feel that both of my parents will remain physically present for a few more years. On our way home we visited my daughter and grandchildren and I got that wonderful pleasure of hearing myself called "Grandma" in person.

~ perspective

It is possible to live in the present
moment with a full cooperation with
whatever is.
It is possible to set waypoints and
destinations for the future and thereby
enabling these plans to come to pass.
It is important to navigate the stream
of whatever is in order to flow
harmoniously along with it, around
obstacles and through challenges,
without necessarily giving up the
ultimate destination.
It is the least stressful not to cling
too tightly to any plan that has a
future-occurrence time frame.
One can live harmoniously by flowing
with what is while still fulfilling
what one yearns for.

#aging #changes #destination #family #future #journey #modifications #now #past #relationships