The future is my enemy, and the past is my best friend.
I believe that we is created to constantly try to find joy in our lifes. It’s the joy that makes us recharge our batteries and that brightens up our lives. If you take away the joy, what's left?
As I wrote in a previous blog post, I can count my great moments of joy on my 10 fingers. The last time I experienced a greater joy in life was almost 7 years ago. Then you might wonder, why is the past Niklas best friend?
In the past I feel safe, it has passed and nothing I can influence. It's history and I can choose to focus on the positive instead of the negative that has happened in my life. Of course I cherry-pick and try to recharge my batteries by thinking of good old memories. For me, it's usually a location that I associate with something good. I can travel to these places and think back that it was better in the old days. It can also be a specific song that I associate with something good. Sometimes it's a movie I saw when life was at its best. This way I charge my batteries. The best thing about the past for me is that the future can never erase these good memories. I am fully aware that psychologists constantly say "focus on the future". But how can I focus on the future when I see it as my enemy, it gives me even more anxiety.
When I felt the worst in 2016, I tried to find the "right" way to live my life. With every psychologist, in every book I read and every forum I visited, the conclusion was always "Focus on the future". Unfortunately, I didn't know better and began to chase the joy in the future. Today, when I feel that things are starting to go in the wrong direction, I instead sit down in peace and quiet and reflect on life, but never longer than the same day. If it is Friday, August 27, 2021, I focus on that day, not what happens tomorrow, in a week or at Christmas.
We can influence the future, but not the past, experts say. Thats true. But if you think that way, it is also important that you are fully aware that you will encounter a number of obstacles along the way. Don't believe that all of a sudden it will knock on the door one day and when you open the door someone says "Hi, it's the joy that is visiting". If you have chased the joy for over 6 years and walked into 3000 different obstacles along the way, you simply stop focusing on the future and instead I focus on the positive from the past. I can understand that some people question my way of thinking and I often hear "You dig your pit deeper and deeper". It’s true that I dug a pit that was very deep, but I stopped digging my pit deeper a few years ago. Instead, I began to accept my life (the depths of my pit) and focus on the past to get my chin above the edge from time to time. If I had not begun to accept my life, the pit would have been down in hell several years ago.
I'm a person who never closes any doors to anything. Which means I'm not closing the door to my worst enemy, the future. I will only be happy if it (the future) convinces me that the past wasn't better. But in any case, I will not chase after it anymore and you will not knock on my door, which means that it will be a bit of a Catch 22.
Everyone finds their own ways to live life. But if you are going to take any advice with this blog post, it is "acceptance for life". Accepting that life is not always easy and sometimes you have to go to the bottom of your pit to realize that life is pretty okay anyway. Unfortunately, there is no final decision on how to live life, we are all different individuals with different expectations of life. I can be content to see Cooper splashing in the water every Sunday while others are not content until they travel around the world. Find your own way!