The past is passed, long live the future.

We have talked a little bit about living in the moment on this blog before.  It’s amazingly important, no matter what you are doing in life.  Every career path and person can benefit greatly from this.  But I have already trod upon those boards, so if you want some more of my rambling thoughts on that, I suggest going back to that post.

This post is a little different.  I was working with a student the other day and we had a bit of a breakthrough.  So as to keep this person’s anonymity intact, let’s call them JohnSusie Squatblatt.  JohnSusie had been noticing that whenever they nailed a read the feeling was fantastic.  They just KNEW that they had done it “right,” and it felt amazing.  When I am working with students, I will often ask them how something felt when they click in to the “right” read.  This is immensely important because there is a LOT to be learned from that feeling. 

JohnSusie, however, had been trying to recapture that feeling on every subsequent read.  Always striving for the read that felt “right” five minutes ago.  What JohnSusie didn’t realize though, was that read WAS “right”… five minutes ago.  It doesn’t apply anymore.  The next “right” read will be different, even though it may result in that same exhilarating feeling.  The breakthrough was this:  don’t try to re-capture the last “right” moment, let it go and move on to the next.

This can be amazingly hard to do.  We all suffer from a little bit of “good-student syndrome” and we want to do it “right.”  When the teacher we are trying to impress is ourselves, the desire to be “right” can be even more overwhelming!  It is so tempting to re-create that feeling we just had… I mean we JUST had it… it was right there.  But it is gone now.  That moment has passed by and the only “right” moment is the next one.  Find that moment and move on to it.

By doing this, we can create a thrilling performance and life.  We never know what we are going to do next because we haven’t done it yet.  It is living life constantly on the edge, always about to tip over into chaos, but just within our control.  I have problems with this, as do most people.  It is so hard to let moments go and move on to the next one, as we are constantly judging how we have just done things.  But dwelling on those things we just did doesn’t help; it just gives us heartburn. 

So the next time you find yourself thinking about how to recapture that sentence you just read, that show you just did, that moment you just lived or that meeting you just had… remind yourself to let it go.  It’s done.  The next great thing you are about to do is just around the corner; so let the new one happen.

You’ll be glad you did.