Today it may be troubling you. Today it may be unbearable. Today you may not be able to see the future.
But time will pass. Even if you don’t do anything, time will pass.
And with passing time, every single day, what’s troubling you today will become more and more distant.
It may be a shock, a big trauma that feels like it will never go away. It may have had a lasting impact on your mental, spiritual or physical health. Its scars may last for years, even decades.
Even so, time will pass, and be it years or decades, what is troubling you will become a distant memory.
Even more, the distance in between the future you and this current memory may be so large that the future you may think that it happened, but it feels like someone else’s memory or even someone else’s life.
It doesn’t feel like that now. It feels like it’s here, forever to stay.
But time is unstoppable. Mercilessly, but also mercifully, it changes everything. And with each passing day, it will bring you closer to the future you that will see today’s troubles as distant, faint memories which may as well belong to someone else.
All you need to do is to take a step every day
Because every little change that happens every other day is what will bring that better tomorrow. For that to happen, every little change, every little memory, every little differentiation that makes the next day a little bit different than today must be let happen.
It’s much easier to accept the little incremental change that each day brings than to resist and reject, knowingly, or unintentionally. Because resistance – desired or unwanted – creates friction against the unstoppable passage of time, and aggravates and amplifies the amount of pressure felt from both the trouble you have and the extra weight it generates by not letting it fade away.
It may not feel like it will ever fade away. It may look larger than life now. But with the memories piled up, little or big joys and sorrows, happy and unhappy moments lived every single day, it will fade into the recesses of the past.
You don’t need to repress. In fact, you must not repress. Repression doesn’t make things go away, but it delays their departure and aggravates all the issues they create.
Instead, take a little step every single day towards the future, despite the existence of your trouble. If some little pleasant or happy thing happens on a given day, let it happen. If some little uncomfortable or sad thing happens on a given day, let it happen. If you laugh for any reason on a given day, laugh however you can. If you cry for a reason on any given day, cry however you will. If you take pleasure from doing something one day, enjoy it, even if the pleasure is peppered with some bitterness or sadness due to your trouble. If you are irritated by something on a given day, feel irritated, even if the weight of your trouble looms in the background.
Each little memory made every single day will carry you into the future. Even if the memories made today are overshadowed by your trouble. Today, they are overshadowed. In the future, as time passes, one day you will discover that the shadow is becoming smaller and smaller, and eventually, a day will come and you will notice that the shadow is gone…
That doesn’t mean that you should sit and wait
An abusive relationship, a life-sucking job with backbreaking work, unbearable circumstances – even these will become memories at one point in the future, but you mustn’t add decades over decades to their passing by just staying and bearing such circumstances.
If you are in an abusive relationship with any person, be it a partner or a spouse, or even parents, get out of it to the best of your ability. If you are having to go through every single day doing back-breaking or stressful work, seek opportunities to change what you do for a living. If you are living in unbearable circumstances, either change your circumstances or change where you are.
If you need to take radical decisions and make radical changes, do so. If you wish to change things without upsetting your world, know that you can also do so by taking things in little steps. Do whatever is necessary to be able to start walking towards the future, even a mixture of radical changes and little changes.
With that, you will enable the coming of the future, and you will make it possible for the trouble to become a distant memory by the passage of time.
And by time, it will be a distant memory
You will still remember it. Maybe even most of the details. But they feel like something happened to someone else, not because you repressed or refused those troubles, but because you grew over them.
The future you, in a few years’ time, is different from the person you are today. The future you in a few decades time, is someone quite different from who you are today.
For the better, or for the worse.
You can make it for the better.
