Why do we procrastinate rather than work toward fulfilling on their dreams? Why are we okay with having an okay life and don’t feel inspired to create a great life? Why are we not taking action to build a bigger, brighter, bolder life—full of opportunity?
It is not because we are lazy.
It’s not because we think that happiness is for grinning fools.
It’s not because we don’t have talents, or skills, or resources.
It is because we either don’t have a future that’s sufficiently inspiring for us or, worse, we have a future that scares us.
Canvas littered with dark spots
Our past shapes our expectations of the future. And what we expect of the future is what our future becomes. In other words, our past perpetuates itself, unless we intervene.
We all have been through hurtful, disappointing, unpleasant experiences and events. And due to our strong self-preservation instinct and a brain that has evolved to predict and protect, we want to make sure that these experiences don’t repeat. And in trying to avoid our past from reoccurring, we’re projecting a bad future, which leaves no space for a great future.
This is very congruent with our human instincts and it comes naturally to us. There’s no fault, or shame, or short-sightedness in functioning like this, because there are strong evolutionary pressures pushing us to. But these pressures don’t always serve us.
We don’t conventionally question or interrogate our instincts, partly because we’re told that they keep us safe. But in fact while they help us in certain situations, our instincts can work against us in others.
When we try to protect ourselves from our fears associated with the future, our future—which in itself is a blank canvas by virtue of the fact that it’s in the future—is no longer a blank canvas. It is now a canvas littered with dark spots that we are trying not to step into.
When we free ourselves from the past, we free our future
We can’t dream big enough when our subconscious is telling us that the future holds pain. The degree to which we haven’t reconciled our past is the degree to which we are not available to the blank canvas that our future is. In trying to make sure that our history doesn’t repeat, we give rise to a future we want to avoid rather than one we want to create. When we clean up our past, we create a blank canvas for ourselves, on which we can now paint the life we really want to create.