Personal Development Ideas

Personal growth: Tough idea; living one day at a time April 7, 2018

Among the many contemporary personal development ideas that attract people’s interest is the concept of living one day at a time, by which we largely forget the past with its difficulties and disappointments, and try not to focus too much on the future with its unfulfilled promise.

Self-actualization, in the day-at-a-time concept, can only be achieved in the present, because the present is the only time-construct in which we can actually accomplish anything.

And clearly, we all recognize this intellectually, so why is it so hard to put into practice; why do we insist on re-living, or trying to reconstruct the past?

And why do we focus even more in the illusion of the future instead of concentrating on the now – the only time we really have?

We realize that it’s important to learn from our past, and that we need to plan for the future.
But, regardless, we devote far too much intellectual and emotional energy to the past and the future. Why do we do this?

One of the reasons is because we seem to be subconsciously programmed to try to escape the hard and unpleasant reality that we are not immortal; that we have only a very limited time of being alive.

So we try to mentally recreate and analyze, and rationalize our past and spend even more time on envisaging a future in which we are free at last of worrying problems and anxieties.

But focusing on these two completely unreachable time-frames – the past and the future – robs us of the very real enjoyment and rewards, and yes, the attendant difficulties, of living life in the present.

It takes a lot of intense internal effort to recognize this, but it’s something we should all probably work on.

Dennis Mellersh