Lola Adesioye

The start of a new year is always an exciting time. Mostly, we look back at the year before and go over, reflect on and ponder what we did and didn’t do. More often that not, we decide we’d like more of what worked, and less of what didn’t. We then go to work on creating resolutions, aims or goals that will have us achieve that end. And it is, in my view, precisely for this reason – using our past experiences to determine what we do and don’t want for the future  - that 35% of resolutions don’t make it past the end of January.

Frederick Nietzche once said “The future influences the present just as much as the past”. I would contend that the past actually has very little influence on our present, and it is the future that influences our way of being and state of mind in the present.

Think of it this way: on Friday of this week, I am going on vacation to an island. (This is a true scenario by the way!). It’s freezing cold and miserable here in New York, yet I’m excited because I know that at the end of this week I will be lying on a white sandy beach or on a boat with clear water, in the sunshine. The thought of that future is what’s lighting me up today.

Fast forward to two weeks time. No doubt as I contemplate returning to freezing cold New York from my beautiful island, I’ll be feeling a bit sad, a bit down perhaps. Again, what will be impacting me at that moment will be the thought of the future. What’s impacting us at any given moment is the thought of the future that’s coming at us.

Yet sometimes it can feel like it’s the past that’s influencing us today. How so? This is because we place our past – or at least our memories/thoughts/beliefs/opinions/judgements of the past – in our future. So when we look to the future, we think about all of the things that have happened to us before and we try to either recreate them or avoid them.

For example, I might decide that one of my resolutions is to ‘lose weight’. This might be because when I look back at 2009, I see that I put on more weight than I would have liked and this year I’d like to be slimmer. I decide that I never want to weigh as much as I did in 2009. It’s likely that I won’t lose weight. And if I do, it may not be for long. Why? Because what’s really behind my resolution is my thoughts and feelings about being bigger. So really I’m not focussed on losing weight, I’m more focussed on avoiding being big and therefore what’s really in my mind is ‘bigness’. It’s a subtle, but key difference. In tying my future actions to either getting away from or getting towards something from the past, it becomes inevitable that the past will repeat itself in some way.

We believe that resolutions are creating something new, when in fact we are usually just making some version of something that has already come before. That’s why people get easily discouraged and give up. The progress that they thought they would make doesn’t manifest and it simply feels like more of the same. That’s because it IS more of the same.

There is a difference between making a resolution that has the past as its centrepoint  and creating an entirely new future to live into that has no relation to anything that has come before. I know that this is quite a radical way of thinking, and one that runs counter to what we generally conditioned to believe and are taught. However, if the past is always used as your reference guide, you can never truly create anything new.

What would you create for 2010 if you were starting from a totally blank slate? What would you create if you weren’t thinking about how something did or didn’t go in the previous year?

That’s what creating a future really looks like. So my question for you is what future are you living into? And what future are you creating in 2010?