Being Present - Remember The Future

What will be will be. That’s a fact.

We can control what will be. That’s sort of a fact.

The reason that’s not entirely a guarantee is because there are so many things that happen in the universe that are outside of our control. That includes other people in our lives.

The future is unknown, and as H. P. Lovecraft pointed out, the unknown is probably man’s biggest fear. That explains a lot of the appeal of fortune tellers, astrology, and other forecasting. Yes, including the weather.

When the future interferes with the present, usually because we spend the present swimming in a Worry River, we are short-changing ourselves. Rather than being open to the marvels of the unknown future, we want to know it in depth so we can plan.

Planning is fine. Worry is not.

Don’t get me wrong, worry is a nice enough hobby. I’m a Virgo; I have a black belt in worry.

But worry uses energy and doesn’t prevent bad things or prepare us for bad things. Because now we’re going to encounter bad things while we’re all negative and exhausted. Probably at best, our worries will be proven accurate. More likely, things will be worse than they could have been if we had just gotten a grip.

I was always making mole hills into mountains, even if there was no support for my fears. Heck, probably ESPECIALLY when there was no support for them. I would worry about little things particularly.

Big things usually don’t get to me. I’m broke and the bills all arrived in the mail today? It’ll be okay. Someone hit the car in the parking lot? I hate that! But it’ll be okay. Federal furloughs with no real good news on the horizon? I don’t really know how, but I believe it will be okay.

Can’t find my badge in the morning before I leave for work? I lose my mind! I can still go to work, get in, and function all day. It will be an inconvenience, but it will be okay. And I firmly don’t accept that at the moment.

I’m a Tree Person. So when issues crop up involving the whole forest, I am usually fine. I guess that, although I can focus just fine on the Forest level, I typically don’t need to. I’m surrounded by Forest People. They worry over big stuff. I’m down here sweating over little stuff.

Consequently, they don’t understand why I can be so calm in the midst of true catastrophe, and they REALLY don’t understand why I’m worried about stuff they didn’t even notice until I pointed it out.

But we both have one thing in common at this point: we are both worrying. And we are probably both worrying over stuff that we really don’t need to.

My view is that I rarely worry over things I can’t do anything about. If the issue is so big that there is simply nothing I can do, then I’m usually fine. It’s out of my hands, so I am free from the need to worry about it. It will all sort out somehow; good or bad, it will all work itself out.

But particularly in relationships, thanks to my past, I worry about the future of the relationship. Not even the Forest View of 40 years down the road. I’m worrying over what I just said, how she just reacted, what I need to do to FIX THIS. Rather than let it go, I begin to obsess: what will this mean to the future? Will it be the beginning of the end? Will my stupid remark become the small snowball that grows as it rolls downhill and eventually crushes a sleepy little village at the bottom of the mountain?

From this fear, I developed a habit.

Habits are funny things. We often think about bad habits and good habits, but what about the good habits that become bad habits? Did you know that could happen?

Men! Hmph!

I grew up in an environment where men were often first-class citizens, and women were on the next lower rung of the ladder. Again, Eve came from Adam, remember. God didn’t create the two together to be equal. Woman was to be submissive to man. Even if you weren’t overly religious, this was an unspoken attitude that just existed.

One of the side effects of this attitude was constantly rubbed in my face: Men don’t apologize! Like, ever! They are so totally wrong, so totally caught at being wrong, but they won’t say they’re sorry. Oh, that was a huge complaint in my world, 1970s Rural America.

So I got the message. Man, did I ever get the message.

In time, I began to apologize in relationships too much. I’m not saying I didn’t do things wrong or own up to them. I believe that any time I said or did something wrong, I apologized. But it went further. Soon I was apologizing for stuff I wasn’t involved with. I began to apologize pretty much as soon as the storm clouds began to appear in her eyes, no matter what the reason.

I was soon apologizing too much, as I either felt guilty about something or I felt the need to show I was a caring, thoughtful man unlike the Neanderthals I heard so much about.

While this is clearly the past intruding into the present, it is really about worrying over the possible future. What if I wasn’t groveling? Soon the familiar echoes would ring in my ears once more, I reasoned. Men don’t apologize. Men don’t admit when they’re wrong. Men really don’t know how to care about a woman’s feelings.

I was not about to let that apply to me, and I sure didn’t want the future to be nothing but her telling her friends “Yeah, he’s a typical guy.”

That’s what it boiled down to, for me. Subconsciously, hearing such negative views on men much of my life scared me from being quite like those men. But in grand fashion I over-reacted. I began to apologize inappropriately, all out of worry:

·         What will other people think about me if I don’t apologize?

·         Will the woman in my life begin to have disdain for me because I don’t apologize enough?

·         Will the woman in my life begin to draw away from me because I’m not sensitive enough, as proven by my lack of consistent apologizing?

Ah ha! Right there, that’s the culprit. That’s her, officer! That’s the woman who robbed me!

Actually, that’s all the women who robbed me, all because they were stuck in marriages with guys who didn’t learn advanced relationship skills. Like there was anyone around who could teach them anyway. Traditional roles didn’t require those skills. Their dads didn’t have them, and women were dismissed, so who would have been left? I had no good role models for any of this.

I’m Sorry I Keep Apologizing!

So I was worried all along about what might happen as a consequence of my lack of apologizing. My abandonment issues suggested that I would lose important people from my life, either emotionally or emotionally and physically, simply because I wasn’t actively, CONSTANTLY proving that I wasn’t like those other guys. So I went too far and apologized ALL THE TIME.

There was probably no such thing as too much apologizing in the marriage. It was one strategy that kept the tempest at bay. But the next relationship had a different kind of dynamic, and my incessant apologizing was an obviously harmful habit.

Now I’m not going to wallow in self-pity because of this bad habit. I did enough of that in the past, and I need to accept what happened and move on in growth and understanding. I am sorry it happened, but it did happen. Trust me, I’ve apologized about it.

Interestingly, as I apologized for every dust molecule that settled near this woman, it caused her to push away from me. It was suffocating to be with someone who just inundated her with these “I’m Sorry” showers. Since I had developed the apology as a defense mechanism to prevent this moving away, I was not equipped to understand that what was needed was for me to back off and chill the heck out. So as she moved, I apologized more for causing her more discomfort, which caused more discomfort, which I then apologized for, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This woman deserves an award of some kind for not simply tagging me with a series of uppercuts on the couch one evening. Probably while we sat watching The King And I.

So I was apologizing to the point of nausea, simply because I was determined not to ever hear those accusations again, nor to lose a woman I loved simply because I was just like every other guy: future events that were simply not realistic for the present I was living in.

That’s not because of me, that’s because she wasn’t like those women either.

As I said, I worry about little things; little things that I can have some impact on, and that are within my scope to do something about. I couldn’t prevent bad things from happening, and I couldn’t always keep from saying or doing dumb stuff. But what I could do was apologize until the person next to me had completely forgotten what happened. By that point she was telling me it was okay, just to shut me up.

So now can you see why the future intruded? It wasn’t because something bad was going to happen. It was because I worried that something bad was going to happen. And I became determined that I would do whatever I knew I had to do to prevent that bad future eventuality. Regardless of how wrong I was for doing so.

I allowed the future to intrude. I did not simply let go f the past, accept the present, and have faith in the future. I didn’t have faith in myself, or in the person I was with. All I knew was what I had grown up with, which is true of most children. It’s especially true of people who had alcoholic parents. My view of reality was shaped by dysfunction, but I assumed it was normal because that’s all I ever saw.

Letting Go Of Compulsive Apologizing By Accepting The Uncertain Future

Here’s a sobering truth, one that came to me in the Mindfulness Process: I cannot prevent someone from entering my life, nor can I prevent them from leaving it. I can sure do things that encourage certain people to stay in my life, but it’s ultimately their decision.

Just like it’s my decision to stay with him or her, it is his or her decision to stay with me as well. I rule my life, but they have sovereignty over theirs. Even if he or she invited me to rule their life, I should always say no. It’s not my place, and I rob them of the dignity to make their own decisions.

I don’t want to be abandoned. I don’t want to care about someone, get my heart all tangled up with theirs, only to have them leave one day and I find myself lonely.

But if it happens, it happens.

It’s not defeatist, nor fatalist. I can do my best to be the best ME I can be, and I can adjust aspects of my life to accommodate someone else’s life. I can do things that enhance the relationship, but in the end I’m just one half of the equation.

And as scary as that is, it is also one of the most liberating things you can ever learn.

Don’t think so?

Which would you rather carry: one barbell or two; one suitcase or two; one case of breakable glass or two?

One side of a relationship, or both sides?

A controlling mentality might consider being solely responsible for both parties in a relationship the safest, most efficient and most reasonable choice. But relationships aren’t safe, efficient, and certainly aren’t reasonable a lot of the time. They are usually risky, inefficient, and tossed around on the waves of an ocean where two weather fronts meet.

We want them to be havens of safety, security, and peace, but until we let go and accept them as they are, they can never truly be what we want them to be. The more we try to second-guess the future and control the person we are with to “ensure” A Happy Ending, the more we jeopardize our own future together. We jeopardize the chance we will be happy, safe, and secure.

So the past was what it was. The present is what it is. And the future is going to belligerently be whatever it pleases. Accepting the future is necessary because I will just be miserable if I let my imagination run wild with What If scenarios all the time. I might be miserable in the future anyway, but at least I need t give it a chance to work out happily.

Actually, just as I can choose how to act, I can choose whether or not to be miserable or happy. If doesn’t even matter what the future brings, because I can choose to feel how I want to feel when I get there.

Emotional Detachment, our next topic.