old rickety bridge across water

Image by Thai Jasmine

Fleetwood Mac (yes, I’m that old) reminded us that “yesterday’s gone”. This is absolutely true - and us ‘holding on’ to it leads to many problems. Many of us have attitudes that haven’t been up-dated since our childhood, and this can lead to big problems in our relationships. At a smaller level it can often take us a few days to recover from an insult or an angry exchange. The question is, “How?”. We may agree that it would be better for the past to not control us, we may even think that we should be free of the past, but how are we meant to get free?

The answer I think is a strange one: by paying attention to it. Usually the past runs our lives because our attitudes are, in a sense, habits that we just picked up along the way. It may be that I picked up a particularly abrupt way of greeting people from my father. This affects a little most times the reaction I get when I greet people. When I realise that I have a particular way of greeting people then I can start experimenting, trying out different ways, and seeing which I prefer. This is what I mean by paying attention. Just by being conscious about what I am doing I begin to be free from my past. From here I can move on to deciding whether I want to change and if so how, but it starts with paying attention to what I’m doing.

“Yesterday’s gone” is a piece of wisdom that I find very valuable. “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” is advice that I feel much more mixed about. In between yesterday and tomorrow is the present moment. Living in the present (even when it means being with the more unpleasant aspects of life) is enlivening. So this gets missed out - and it is a big miss in my view.

However, there are some major positives in thinking about tomorrow. The biggest positive I know in thinking about tomorrow is from a remark made by my friend Paul Wildman. He was speaking about parenting, but it is not confined to only parenting. He said that we usually focus on, “What was done wrong yesterday, not what we can do right tomorrow”. I find this both simple and profound. Thinking this way shifts us from focusing on blame to a constructive attitude of creativity. In this sense “thinking about tomorrow” is an entirely positive attitude.

Thinking about tomorrow is also helpful in more mundane ways - scheduling when we will pays our bills, do the shopping and so on.

The down side of thinking about tomorrow is that it is usually just worrying and fretting. It is usually quite unproductive - we worry about things that we can’t do anything about - and just makes us more tense. In this sense “thinking about tomorrow” is a bad idea. What to do about fretting? The easiest approach I know is, once again, paying attention. There a couple of things to pay attention to: the how and the why. The how means what we do when we are fretting; what our posture is, do we have particular thoughts going round and round, do we have one particular feeling. The why is about what we get from fretting. It is usually not prudent future plans. So what is it? It may be that if we weren’t fretting we’d have to look at aspect of our lives we don’t like or do something unpleasant. Once we know the benefit of fretting we can consider getting the benefit without bothering with the fretting. If we fret instead of doing the washing up, we can consider just not doing it. If we are so busy worrying that we don’t have to do some things, we can consider just saying “no”.

Things we can do (here and now).

  • If we are having a difficulty, with work or in a relationship, for instance; we can explore our attitudes to this. We can explore how long ago these attitudes were formed and become more aware of what they are. From here we can move on to consider updating them.


  • If worry is more a part of life than you would like: consider what benefits it has for you. Do you know what you would like to do instead? What is the first, easy step you can take to do this instead?


  • If you have made a mistake. It may be helpful to feel the bad feelings. Then, move on to asking: What can I do better next time?


  • It can be helpful to have reminders to live in the here and now. A sign on your desk, or in the car can be helpful. It could be something like, “Is my life happening while I do something else?” or as simple as “Breathe”.

How do you feel about yesterday, tomorrow and the here and now? If you’d like to let me know in the comments, I’d like to know.