Personal growth mistake: Wanting the future to repeat the past October 24, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.Tags: life, living in the future, living in the now, personal development, personal development potential, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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It’s natural to want any situational enjoyment with a high positive emotional component to last a long time, ideally forever. As a result, we may develop the habit of projecting our enjoyment of the present moment into anticipated pleasure of the same moment occurring in the future.
This makes full appreciation of the present difficult because our minds are straddling two separate time frames – current real-time reality and imagined future potential.
We can only be in the future mentally, a fact which obviously takes away some of our perception of the present moment.
We are attaching to our future, which can never be more than a thought pattern, the particular emotions of longing and anticipated nostalgia associated with the moment we are currently enjoying.
Any pleasurable experience in the present moment will be more intense and rewarding if we don’t impose on it the mental condition and constriction of future repeatability.
— Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth: Regrets for what we did not do October 21, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: emotion of regret, life, living in the now, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, the present moment, writing
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All of us have done things in our lives, that on reflection, we wish we had not done. But for the most part, studies show, people regret more what they didn’t do in their lives.
* The friends we didn’t keep in touch with
* The time we didn’t spend with our families
* The enjoyable projects we did not undertake
* The apology we didn’t make
* The good intention that we didn’t follow-up on
* The money we didn’t save
But all of this “not doing” is not a pattern we willfully construct.
Rather, I think, it’s the result of thinking there will always be a tomorrow, when eventually and inevitably there will be no tomorrow.
As part of our personal development and self-actualization efforts, we need to remind ourselves of this reality and focus on the opportunities we have today.
Not the opportunities we might have tomorrow.
—Dennis Mellersh
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