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

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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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

Personal growth mistake: Wanting the future to repeat the past October 24, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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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