If things don't change...

Many years ago, I came across a Tibetan saying: “if you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what it meant but over the years it’s come to be an important saying to me because it has two meanings.

Firstly, it reminds me of that other old saw – if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same. Whatever we’re doing now, we’ll still be doing it in ten years unless something intervenes to change it. Often, we rely on circumstances or external factors to change what we’re doing – we complain about a job that makes us unhappy but don’t take the steps to improve it or leave, preferring instead to hope that something – redundancy, retirement, a lottery win – will intervene to change things.

Of course, more often than not, those things don’t happen and so time drifts by and we find our selves fundamentally living the same life we lived ten years previously. It’s only then we realise that “if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same” isn’t the entire truth: that only holds true if the rest of the world is static, too. It’s more accurate to say that if things don’t change they’ll steadily decline – but that’s quite depressing and doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The second meaning for my Tibetan phrase is the one that really resonates with me. Whatever your life is like in this moment, the chances are that the shape of your life has its roots in your past – often quite some way in your past. We plant seeds every day and they grow slowly – sometimes we do not even know that we are planting them but they bear fruit in our lives nonetheless. We are often too casual about this – not paying attention to the seeds we’re planting, only to have them blossom into a harvest that we really don’t want.

It’s truly the case that we reap what we sow in life. Each day, consciously or unconsciously, we are shaping our future and we must pay attention to the seeds we’re planting. This week, as you go about your life, focus on what you are doing in each moment; for every activity, think carefully about how it will shape your future – because it surely will.