Try to live in the moment – it will be your ticket to a truly fulfilled and happy life
We live in a world where success is very often defined by having a plan and knowing exactly what the next step is for us. We need to know the big picture, have milestones, and ideally have every decade of our life planned out in effective and efficient ways. This is meant to be the ideal and is believed a guarantee for success. Very often, the opposite is the case. To have a plan for everything makes us anxious, stressed and never truly enjoy the moment. The art, therefore, is to find a balance between enjoying the moment, and not losing focus of the big picture. However, this is easier said than done for many of us.
Very often, we are already confronted with the desire to have a plan in our early childhood. Our parents imagine a great education for us, to grow into certain jobs such as lawyers or doctors with secure income as well as to find a great partner and form a family. Those are already a lot of expectations on our shoulders that can lead to stress and anxiousness from an early stage. For some of us, it is easy to fulfill those expectations early on, as they align with the path we imagine for our lives. However, for many of us, the pressure seems to be overwhelming, and we try everything to try and fulfill those desires from the people around us. What we are missing though, is to question if those desires align with our strengths and the way we ourselves imagines our life to go.
If we only live according to expectations and pressure being put on us to tick boxes, we will never be able to truly enjoy the moment we live in. Instead, we always ask ourselves what is the next big thing we must achieve, what is the next box we must tick? We will therefore never be able to enjoy periods of relaxation and strike a balance between enjoying our achievements so far and go get what is next.
People very often assume that enjoying their achievements and not immediately jumping at the next opportunity makes them look lazy or low achievers. This is not the case. It is even good when we do not immediately jump at the next opportunity presented to us, as we will have time to think, reflect and make better choices at the time when we are ready for our next step. We can take our time to sit back and not think about our next move or strike to make. This is more a sign of thoughtful progress, than one of laziness. It will allow us to enjoy the moment, take a break from spending too much time with our own thoughts and learn to better handle our anxieties we all have. It will also allow us to be more relaxed and ready for when we do decide to jump onto the next step, which then however should also be an active choice driven by motivation and passion, rather than by the desire to only tick the next box on our bucket list.
We need to learn to live in the moment again, while not losing focus on our bigger picture goals. The art here is to really find a balance between the two extremes. It will make us more fulfilled; it will let us see that there is more to life than just having a successful career or always having a plan. It will also make us realize that it is ok not to always know what the next step is going to look like. It is ok not to know. Taking time to live in the moment can even help us to find out what we want that can be helpful at a later stage. Finding the balance between living in the moment and having focus on a bigger plan is something that tales a lot of time and care to master. Once we do though, the world is open to us to live a happy and fulfilled live that truly is build on enjoyment.
