Do You Remember Your First Time?
When we think about what we want to do or be next, it's good to think back to the first time we got to do or be that ideal. Not the last time. The first time.
We are more capable than we think we are. We often think that finding our way to the kind of life we want requires magical effort and huge change, and that moving into who we want to be is some kind of mystery that only special people are allowed to figure out.
It does take effort, but it only feels magical. Transformation is amazing, but think about this: Could you really know what you want, could you really have that deep longing for a specific something different, if you didn’t already have a sense of its value? And could you really know that you want what you want if part of it wasn’t already inside you?
It’s important to remember we already carry a lot of the tools and know-how that we need to design the lives we want. Across a lifetime, we get to dabble in a lot of different kinds of experiences, if we’re lucky. These experiences - good, bad, and indifferent - become stored knowledge.
You are a walking library of stored knowledge. You can dig into that knowledge and claim whichever lessons and epiphanies you want for your future self. It’s simply a matter of figuring out how to use which shovel and what to do with those experiences when they come to the surface.
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