Your Path: Looking to the Future

Seedlings (and weeds) coming up at my home in Utah. April 2022.

It's often hard to put an idea into words, especially one that holds great personal meaning but might not make sense to others.

Over the weekend, I heard some lines while watching the anime 空の境界 (Kara no Kyoukai) that helped me further examine an idea my mind has been engaged with for some months now. Here is the English version:

It's a mistake to choose your path based upon the sins that you carry. We don't choose our path based on the sins that we carry, but we must bear our sins on the path we choose.

As soon as I heard these words, I recalled another line I heard a few months ago. This one is from a guided meditation:

It's the future, not the past, that determines who we become.

When I first heard that line in the meditation, it struck me as life-changing (to put it dramatically). Those words have stayed with me over the past few months, and though I've thought about them a lot, I haven't been able to accurately put into words the feelings they bring up. I will do my best to explain some thoughts here.

Based on the idea of these two quotes, I recall a recent conversation with my mom. As a life coach, she expressed frustration with a focus in modern psychology that seems intent on blaming the past for our present circumstances and choices. Blame our parents. Blame our childhood traumas. Blame religion. Blame society. Let's go back even further and blame our ancestors! On the surface, it appears to make sense that we want to go back to the origin of some problem in order to fix it, but the reality is that these things are in the past, cannot be changed, and are therefore out of our control. It may help to realize what situation may have been the trigger of some current thought process, but we can't let ourselves become stuck there. If we are stuck on blaming the past, the things out of our control, we may miss the present that is in our control. We need a way to move forward.

That is where a focus on the future comes in. It's something that is very hard to focus on because it is so uncertain, there may be some fears attached to it, and there is no way to blame what hasn't happened yet. However, this mindset shift gives us a choice in our present lives because we are not letting past mistakes determine the path we are on. Where we want to be tomorrow, next week, or in ten years determines what we do today. I'm not suggesting that we have to burn all the bridges from the past to move on in life. We can leave some some old pathways open to reflect on, but we must not dwell too long on what is in the past. Choose something in the future to work towards. Let that be our guide rather than our past struggles.

I have attempted to put into words an underlying thought that has possessed me the past few months. I still cannot fully grasp its meaning. I’m still seeking for answers. Some things cannot be expressed in words alone, but make a deep impression in the soul. All I can do is attempt to bring the idea out and share it so others may work with it and find something for their own path in life.

Whether I have been successful in explaining my thoughts is outside of my control. It’s in your hands now.