Past, future, and present

I think one of my major failings as a person is that I spend entirely too much time thinking about the past and the future, and not nearly enough time thinking about the present.

I don’t really understand how I got to be this way, but I think it’s a source of a lot of unhappiness for me. Among other things, a lot of my thoughts of the future are in the format “when I ….. then I’ll be happy”, where … can be replaced with get out of debt, figure out how to make N work correctly, etc. And, of course, I get whatever it is accomplished, and then I come up with some new value for …

As far as looking towards the past, I think of things and people long gone – in some cases, dead – and miss them, and feel sad. I think a little bit of this is normal and even positive, but I think I take it entirely too far.

The past is gone, and I should look towards tomorrow not in a planning sense, or in the sense of being worried or fearful about what could come, but in a sense of being excited about what the future could bring.

I sound like chicken soup for the soul or something.. yeesh…

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