It is said that if you are feeling feelings of depression, your mind is somewhere in the past, mourning that which you cannot go back and change. If you are feeling feelings of anxiety, your mind is somewhere in the future, feverishly anticipating that which you cannot go forward and control. If your mind is at peace with little worry or sorrow, you are in the present.
Mourning The Past
Mourning is one of our natural experiences as human beings who have to go through loss. The experience of mourning is different from grieving. Grief is also a natural experience and comes in waves of different stages. Mourning tends to be the deeply painful attachment to the past, the lamentation and wailing sorrow of what has been lost. Though we may not be thrashing ourselves upon the floor hollering from the depths of our hollow hearts, we are being consumed by an impassioned attachment to the past.
The past has a lot to teach us. Part of our recovery may include going back to the past with our minds and feeling feelings we left there, mourning our losses, and going through the grief cycle in order to move forward. When we get stuck in the past, we can’t move forward. Time keeps ticking but our hearts and minds are trapped in another world.
Living in the past anchors us to regret, resentment, and frustration because we cannot go back and change the past. In order to become present and move into the future, we have to find a way to let go of the past. Forgetting the past isn’t the same as letting go. Instead, we find peace and acceptance with all of our experiences.
Anticipating The Future
The future is coming every single second of every single day. Simultaneously, we are in a state of the now and that what is to come. Every moment of the future turns into a moment of the present and then into the past within literal nanoseconds. Time isn’t what we’re worried about in the future. What we are concerned with is how much of the future we can control and what it means if we cannot control all of it. Since the future is going to come to us as the present, we must learn to be present with our thoughts of the future. We can only take life as it comes, one moment at a time. Being present and grounded in the now is essentially living in the future because we are connecting the parallels of time, in real-time, in a real way.
Recovery is real and is possible for any man willing to dedicate himself to the task. Tree House Recovery offers men a path to find freedom from addiction by building a sustainable recovery out of sustainable change. For information, call us today: (503) 850-2474
