Wow. And I’ve (allegedly) been doing it right!

The example of migrants to the US is a good one. It illustrates how it is the future which gives us who we are being in the present. These people suddenly found themselves with a future free from oppression or hunger or poverty, for example, and this had them be people of joie de vivre and energy and dynamism and plans and businesses, and so on. SGx

For example, one day a few years ago you had your insight about Kipling’s “If” and its application to life. In that moment you stepped into “possibility” (Landmark uses this word in a special way, not in the way we normally use it which, as you implied, is something like a “maybe, one day, someday” proposition). In that moment, you started “being” a best-selling author because of the future you were now living into. As a result of that “being” you now had IN THE PRESENT, you started “doing” things consistent with being a best-selling author (eg, writing a proposal, researching, getting an agent, starting a blog, etc) and as a result of doing these things you started “having” what a best-selling author has (eg, invitations to debates, book advances, lots of readers of your blog, etc).

That is, it’s your “being” in the present (which is determined by the future you’re living into) that gives you “doing” and then “having.” Note, this sequence is the reverse of how we normally think life works (which is “do” then “have” then “be”). Sgx

To act as if there is a promising future, rather than being paralysed by the past, one must get out of one’s rut, or stop “playing the old tapes”.

You are doing it one way, by changing your life through an act of will. The other way is when adversity strikes us – the “disaster” spoken of in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.

A disaster throws us out of the rut of habit, makes us throw away all our old assumptions, so that we become new people.

The late San Francisco longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, wrote much about why people change, and particularly how people in their millions, changed after they arrived on America’s shores from the “Old World”.

The huddled masses, tired and poor, became, metaphorically overnight, forward-looking entrepreneurs, new people with heads held high. It was this transformed energy of the newly-arrived millions, which made America into what it is today. The same would apply to pioneers to new lands anywhere.

They abandon their old selves, and become new selves.

War changes people. Think only of how much the post-1945 world was different from the world pre-1939. Soldiers returning in their millions to civilian life were no longer content with things as before, because their experiences in war had changed them.

They came back as new people, and the world transformed as a result.

1) The ancient Greeks thought of us walking backwards through time–eyes fixed on the past, blind to the future.

2) The Hindus/Yogis/Buddhists think of our cumulative pasts (this and past lives) as, in effect, determining our present. Samskara, Karma, etc.

2) Modern psychology (eg Dan McAdams) thinks of identity as narrative, ie life-stories that we invent for ourselves, which is backward-looking.

So you’re absolutely right: We’re totally trapped in the past. But how could we possibly escape from it, if we don’t know the future? To tell life narratives in the future tense is to speak in probabilities and scenarios. “I am somebody who might become a bestselling author.” “I am somebody who will not become a best-selling author.” It’s quite hard to build an identity on that.

What was their answer?