Your present is decided by your future

Sounds impossible? It did to me, when I first heard about it. I was at this "Team building" workshop at one of the Pune farms, more than "team building" it was more about the emotional quotient (EQ) I believe, about inter-personal relationships at work, how to identify a team member's positive points etc. etc.

One of the things our trainer said was "How you are in the present, or your state of mind is defined by your future"... I tried to argue with him about how the person you are in the present is a result of your past experiences, your experiences make you, and you are a product of the past therefore.. It took me a sort of a "role play" to really understand what he meant..
He told me - "Imagine yourself on a Monday morning at office, you see a huge backlog of e-mails in front of you that need to be acted upon, you see your calendar for the entire week filled up with meetings that you don't quite like to attend!.. How would you be feeling on that Monday morning".. Well - I guess, the expressions on my face gave way, and he laughed, said - "See, I know how you would be feeling.. How you feel on that Monday morning is not decided by the great weekend you have had, but by what you see yourself doing in the near future!".. He said, contrast this scenario with this one - "It is Thursday evening, the same office, same number of e-mails, but now you know that you are going off for a three-day break with your family to Singapore... How do you feel on that Thursday evening".... I don't think I need to tell you how I would feel in that situation...

What is different in the two cases - "Not the past, not the present - but the future".. And my state of mind, how I felt about my present was totally decided by what I saw myself doing in the future...

After hearing this - I was so sold out on this idea.. I had never thought about my present that way. I never thought my future will be affecting me in my day-to-day present, but now that I think about it - it so very much does.. If you still do not get it - think about that Friday evening when you return home with a song on your lips, think about the time when you are anticipating the salary at the end of the month with the bonus for the year, and then think about the Monday morning blues you get almost on every other Monday..

Well - now the point is, this is a different thought - but how does it really help? How you want this thought to help you, is really upto you. For me, in some sense, it was liberating - liberating to realize that my present is not bound by the shackles of my past, that what I am and what I want to be in my present is really decided by my future... And the best thing about future is that you don't really know much about it, and in one way or the other, future is in your hands.. Put two and two together, and it seems now that your Present is really in your hands.. You decide how you are and what you want to be on any given day.

The trainer said another thing that has remained in my head - You want the freedom to choose your life, use that freedom, take your own decisions, but remember that the freedom always comes with a responsibility. Be responsible for who you are and who you want to be, and be free to choose your own path!