In my last blog post, I wrote about how Wherever You Go, There You Are and this months musings are along the same vein.
The house buying process is moving along slowly. I shouldn't be surprised, everyone always says that buying a house is stressful and slow so really I'm grateful that we're only experiencing the slow part and not finding it particularly stressful. As I mentioned in my last post, this move feels different to every other time I've moved house because I'm not getting that feeling of "I just want to move now". If anything, I'm quite happy with the slowness of the process as it means I don't feel like we're rushing into anything. But there have been moments when I have caught myself teetering on the edge of old thinking patterns, particularly in the area of tidying and organising.
For the valuation of our flat, we spent a whole day cleaning and tidying and making the place look like a show home, which was lovely to look at it, but behind the drawers and cupboards, my usual organisation was thrown into disarray. The not-so-pretty everyday items that live out on display needed a home during the valuations and so they naturally got stowed in every available cupboard and drawer. But they didn't go back to their usual homes immediately.
We enjoyed how tidy the flat looked, so we kept several things hidden away until we needed them but in the mean time, getting things out of the previously well-organised drawers and cupboards became more and more challenging and this is when that old way of thinking started to creep back in. I found myself thinking, there's not much point in re-organising the cupboards now if we're moving house soon. And that right there is what this blog post is all about.
The problem with that way of thinking is that you start living for some time in the future rather than living for today. And the kicker? Every day is Today.
How you live today is how you'll live tomorrow and the next day. You don't suddenly wake up one day and start acting how you think you will when you move house or start a new job, or start dating The One (especially if you start dating The One but that's a whole rabbit hole we don't have time for today). If you don't make a start Today on forming those good habits that you imagine Future You has, then they're never going to happen.
The future that you picture, the one where you've lost the weight, got the dream job or met the guy, doesn't spring up on you and surprise you into suddenly forming new habits and changing your way of thinking. I actually believe that it works the opposite way round and that it is creating these new healthy habits that attracts the weight loss, the new job, Mr Right; I talked about it in an old post, Intentions. I've long replaced the old belief of "I'll be happy when..." with "I'll be happy, and then...".
In the case of something that you know is coming, like buying a house for instance, the deadline creeps closer and closer until it arrives but all that time you are thinking about it, planning and preparing for it so that when it finally arrives, it's just another day. Yes, it's a big day and an exciting day but unless you are already the kind of person who keeps immaculate kitchen cupboards, you're not suddenly going to become that person just because you have a bigger kitchen. Especially in the instance of clutter and staying tidy, if you haven't been practicing being a tidy person, you have no baseline for it and just like how work expands to fill the time, clutter expands to fill the space.
This is why you must start before you are ready.
The secret to creating the life you want is to start acting like the person you want to be today. With a few exceptions (like life-changing experiences), circumstances don't change your habits, your habits change your circumstances.
This is why I did take the time to reorganise my kitchen cupboards and tidy our wardrobe before moving, instead of waiting until until it was time to pack up. For starters, we don't have a move in date yet, so we could be living with messy drawers any amount of time and I don't know about you, but I would find that frustrating. Secondly, when it comes to a bit of decluttering, we'll have enough work cut out for us when it comes to packing without throwing in an extra step of deciding what to keep at the same time. But while these are perfectly sound and sensible reasons to re-organise the kitchen cupboards now and not wait until we move, the real reason I spent a Tuesday evening doing them is because I heard that voice in my head start to say "it's not worth the effort" and I felt with every fibre of my being that actually, my home and the joy I get from it is worth the effort.
And so are you. If there is something that you picture yourself doing in the future, be it yoga, speaking a new language, or maybe something like being more financially secure, I hope you'll hear me when I say that your future is filled with days like today. When I first heard that line, it resonated with me so hard that I had to pull over my van and stop for a minute. Your future is filled with days like today. I don't mean days like today in terms of what you did or who you saw or where you went, I mean in terms of how you thought, how you felt, how you spoke, how things affected you and how you affected other people. Wherever you go, there you are and that includes your future.
I used to think that when I retire I will be one of those glamourous retirees, who lives in a beautiful retirement village with an on-site spa, and who dresses in lovely clothes and gets her hair and nails done at the salon. I pick up some of the dogs that I walk from a village just like that and several months ago, I had an epiphany. I was watching a couple who had not long moved into the village; the husband was reading the paper from a comfortable chair on their porch and his wife brought him out a cup of tea. I was struck by the overwhelming realisation that they had probably been doing that same thing every day for years, or some version of it. They didn't suddenly start this new, cute routine just because they'd moved into this new place, they had been doing it forever. The wife was dressed in the sort of clothes that I pictured Retired-Aislinn wearing but they're not the clothes I wear now. As a younger retiree, it was clear to me that this woman had always dressed this way and that her retirement was simply a continuation of the rest of her life. And that's when it dawned on me: Your retirement is a continuation of the rest of your life. If you don't dress like that now, you won't dress like it then. If you don't live that lifestyle now, you won't live it then.
Each phase of life, each milestone, is the next logical step on your path and it's not logical to go from being someone who lives pay-check to pay-check to someone who has an abundance of expendable income. The logical steps to reach that goal, if that's what you want, are to start making small changes now, that build over time until the point where your next logical step is one of bottomless brunches and theatre tickets and cruise ships.
That realisation was so freeing. It freed me from the misconception I'd been living under my whole life; that someday my life would miraculously change and then I would be happy. It freed me from the prison I had created in my own mind; one I was waiting for someone else to release me from. I realised that unless I started creating a version of that life that I wanted today, then my future would never look like it either. With that realisation came a feeling of empowerment and I started making little changes to how I live. I feel as though I have started to mould the clay of my life, turning it slowly into a version of that ideal life I have always dreamed of and I hope this post inspires you to do the same. Because no one else is going to do it for us, it's up to us.
Your future is filled with days like today, so start living the life you want, today.
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