How would your life change if you could see into the future? You might be able to avoid disasters or take advantage of opportunities. You might be able to help people before they got into trouble.
But what’s the point of speculating—no one can see into the future, right? Or can we?
There have always been people who seem to have the power to accurately predict future events, whether it’s the stock market, the weather, or people’s reactions.
Smell is often the most undervalued sense.
For many of us, unless a scent is extremely strong, extremely pleasant, or extremely unpleasant, we don’t pay much attention to it. Even with our limited sense of smell (compared to many animals), there is a wide range of smells in the world that we can enjoy, that can provide information, and that can become another universe for us to explore.
There are many variants out there of the Five Senses Mindfulness exercise, in which the participant focuses on each of their five senses in turn. It’s a great exercise in mindfulness and a good starting point for being more mindful of our senses, but if we can expand this idea into our regular moment-to-moment mindfulness, it will result in whole new worlds opening up to us.
Everything we have, everything we know, and everyone we love will someday be gone. We will all be gone someday too.
Permanence is a delusion, and although the idea of permanence can sometimes be comfortable—making us feel secure and stable—it can also make us unprepared for the changes in our lives.
If we feel we can maintain our lives just the way they are in any given moment, we will invariably be frustrated and disappointed.
We all have something to learn from our past.
Our personal history is a rich source of experiences that we can learn from and that can help us live a healthy and meaningful life. We can draw on our past experiences when we face challenges, enter unknown territory, or have a difficult decision to make. We shouldn’t live in the past, but we shouldn’t ignore it, either. The past can help us predict the outcomes of our actions and help guide us in achieving our goals.
Looking, waiting, and wondering.
Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?
It’s a very common thing to constantly be looking forward to, planning for, or thinking about something coming up.
There often seems to an implicit assumption that the future will be, in some way, better than now. But the truth is that the light at the end of the tunnel is overrated. It always looks better than it is, and it never quite arrives.
The trick is to make the tunnel our own. With the right perspective, the tunnel itself can become the light.