Let go of imagining the unknown

Palermo, Sicily

This past year has been difficult. A few weeks ago, I was talking with a dear, dear friend of mine, when I spoke about what was bothering me.

“It’s just tough for me when there are so many things that I can’t control. So many things that I don’t know how they will unfold.”

And as it usually is when speaking with a friend, she understood me completely. Even more, she revealed to me what I didn’t even know I was really trying to say.

“Don’t you mean everything?”

Because really, everything is usually out of our hands. Sure, we can do our best to be prepared, to manage our reactions to external situations, but in reality, it usually is always beyond our control. We never really know what is going to happen next.

It was amazing to have this simple truth put before me. It was empowering. I understood that I was really suffering because I was very focused on trying to control not only the uncontrollable, but the unknowable. I can’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, or two months from now, or one year in the future. And that is wonderful. Why have I been making myself miserable trying to predict a future, when the real thing will, God-willing, be so much better, so much fuller, and so much richer than I could imagine? What I think I know is so limited to what there is, to what there can be.

Given the many detours and u-turns and stuck in traffic moments of the past year, I have really found it difficult to remember the feeling of being on an open road, with so many possibilities before me. But they are still present. If I look back to one year ago, I felt there was very little possibility for things in my life to change. However, despite having not really left my house or my neighborhood that much this year, a lot has changed, and for the better.

I am working to surrender to the present and to look to the future with only hope and vague ambition, instead of pre-determined ideas of how things “should be.” Because the best things appear when you don’t even know what it is you are looking for.

keep an open mind, and a hopeful heart

love,

greer