← all posts
Make things better by making better things.
Anxiety is about what will happen in the future. No one is anxious about what has already happened. What’s done is done.
Uncertainty about the next thing racquets tension in our lives. Of course, not knowing what tomorrow brings is the juice. If we had a script, we wouldn’t be excited about opportunities.
The problem is that our brains can transform us into the future and construct a reality. It’s not an actual “Reality” but one built on fiction and fantasy. The thing is, we tend to imagine this world of extremes. Vacations are better in our minds than they are. Undesirable outcomes also seem worse with how they construct they will be than what happens.
The thing we don’t give ourselves enough credit for is that we are more resilient than we realize. Whatever comes our way, we figure it out. And we don’t see the long list of problems we solve that got us here; we see the long list of the issues we have caused or needed to solve. What we don’t do enough construction of, for good reason, is imagine the problems we could have faced along the way. The issues we avoid are not the ones we see on our to-do list.
If you could list all the problems you have solved in your life and all the problems you have avoided, you would have a better case to believe in your ability to get things done. Since we can’t do that, we must trust that we can.
In this mess, problems aren’t just the ones you face but the ones you avoid, too.