Fearing the future.

Feeling uncertain about the future and muddled up with the present…

I have quite often been there.

Worrying about what is going to happen next…

The prospect of not knowing if something good or bad will happen to me in the near future produces so much stress and discomfort.

Now the philosophical question comes, how to deal with it?

The number one thing that I have realised is that most of us worry ourselves with things that are most likely never going to happen, or basically that our worst fears will rarely ever come true. There are sure some situations that we think could adversely affect our lives, but usually even those aren’t life shattering. So we should ask ourselves what is the worst that could happen. Let’s take an example. Imagine that you are in a class of people. Look at the people around you and figure out what is the worst that’s happened to them. There will be things like this person got low marks in a test, or that person lost an important match. Generally speaking, there won’t be a person who has been kidnapped, or a person who has been diagnosed with a serious disease, or a person with a severe injury. For most of us, most of the time, life’s challenges are actually the small little things, which would hardly be relevant a decade from now. So after figuring all that out, drop the topic!

There would also be times where there is really nothing you can do about the future. I mean you can only do what you can today, and if there is nothing you can do about it, you are better off just going for a jog or taking a nap than worrying about things that are not even in your hands. There is actually a theory known as the circle of concern and the circle of influence. Letting go of things that are outside your circle of influence, and only focusing on things that you can control. For example, you can’t exactly control the traffic in Mumbai! But you can very well control your own behaviour and actions.

So for items you can control (things inside your circle of influence) , turn worries into work. For situations where you know for sure that you probably won’t achieve what you want to, there is no point in fearing about it. And I realised that working on it is the best antidote to worrying about it. Trying to make a better future by working on getting positive outcome for next time. This step takes a lot of courage to accept and do what you can, with what you have, and more importantly, believe you can face your fears to make a better future.

All that said, there will realistically be situations where your brain just refuses to be so logical and you feel that restlessness about what is going to happen. And that is where our dear old friend meditation comes in …

Meditation helps to stabilise us in the face of fear to help us understand it more clearly. With breathing and meditation, we can actually understand ourselves, our emotions and our fears, dig deeper into our thoughts and feelings.

So fear is a choice, you spend time worrying about it or you spend time understanding and getting over them…the choice is ours. 😊

– Saania Saxena