“Tomorrow is tomorrow.
Future cares have future cures,
And we must mind today.”
― Sophocles, Antigone
Previously we've looked at our usually uneasy relationship with impermanence. Most of us don’t like that everything comes and goes and changes. So we attach or cling to things hoping they will steady our experience. We also investigated why we might ignore the interdependence of all things. We're more comfortable turning experience into objects of the mind and assuming that each object has its own separate reality and it stays just that. However, when we accept interdependence, we see that everything relies on many other conditions and probabilities and lets us know we, too, aren't actually separate and isolated either.
Now I'd like to consider a very subtle craving many of us come to see in the face of life's eventual outcomes. We see clearly that the mental images we created in our minds of a specific future and future best self differ markedly from the outcomes. When our hold on such specific projections is strong, we can easily get lost in planning, expecting and demanding that the world acquiesce. And, as an additional point of suffering, the comparing mind arises to judge the present moment with the idealized moments of an unknowable future. Letting go of expectations of a specific future and future self is really in service to what is true now. It lets us realize the true self that is already here, a self that can flourish with whatever arises, and whenever it arises.