Chapter 4 : Past Present or Future?

Capturing Moments. That is what my job is all about as most moments only happen once. You can't miss it. Do you ever get that message twice in the day or week where you hear the same thing , the same word, the same encouragement, the same advice but doubled? Well for me this happened on Sunday and I heard the word EMBRACE 2 times.Embrace. What does it mean? To be grateful where I am at? To accept something wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. Wait does that include all situations and all life stages even the ones that seem to suck?My friends often tell me that I am really good at focusing on the future. Another reason why you have friends, they tell you what you are good at in case you forget! Guess this is related to chapter 1 where I discussed that success has a lot to do with achieving your goals which are set for the future. So I must be very future driven. There are so many things I want to do in life. The future is what gives me hope and what motivates my present.Ok so my memory is like a gold fish which helps for letting go of the past especially since life is like an upward curve, it only gets better. Uni is better than high school, work is better than uni, working for myself is better than working for someone else. Contrary to the happiness curve which is apparently a U - shape where there is a dip in your 30-50s and 20s are your highest. I have to highly disagree with that. No thanks for going back. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted in my early twenties plus you have no money! Seriously do not know how uni people these days do the smashed avo thing whilst saving up for that house deposit unless they are going to invent the next snapchat?Where are you living in? Are you reminiscing on the past and wishing things are the way they used to be? Or are you constantly chasing after the next thing that is going to give you some sort of satisfaction and validation? Are you living in the present and actually listening and not constantly checking your phone whilst you have a real person sitting in front of you?Sometimes I find that we live in our own worlds. In a lie possibly. And we portray that lie on our social media. Where we define our own meaning of everything including what is right or wrong, or what does love really mean, what is healthy, what is normal. It was so refreshing when I got woken up by a phonecall from a friend who’s had limited access to his phone because he has joined the army reserve and he had one phonecall, what would life look like if we had our phones taken away, would it force us to live and embrace the present more?I still stick by living with the future in mind. It would be silly to live just in the moment and pretend there are no consequences. What you believe your future to be dictates how you live today. The challenge then is how to embrace the now when you are not where you want to be YET, where things have not necessarily turned out the way you expected. Where things are taking longer than you thought. But how boring would that be. If life just happened exactly as you planned. If god answered every prayer exactly what and when you asked for it. There would be no detours. No character building. No patience. No endurance. No compassion. No friends. No impromptu adventures. No wisdom.I truly believe that the best things in life happen when you least expect it. So EMBRACE where you are now because things will change, guaranteed. You get to choose whether your happiness curve is a U shape as the voices and stats tell you OR whether it is an upward line.You decide. And in the meantime, there is me, to capture those moments that you will remind you where you have been and how far you have come!