Practicing Our Future

Practicing Our Future August 27, 2016

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There are people who believe our behavior is shaped primarily by our past. These people see us practicing the examples we have experienced. They understand our lives as responses which reflect the ways we have seen others respond.

Other people advocate taking personal responsibility for our own actions. Whatever circumstances we have faced in the past, they argue, we choose our own lives. These people urge us to make wise choices and put them into practice.

There is some truth in both perspectives, though I see things another way.

Our lives, I believe, are more than how we react to our past or the sum total of our own choices. We spend our lives practicing our future.

Most of us have made some resolutions or tried to develop, or stop, some habits. We can see how what we do in the immediate present helps us live into the future. Many have also come to realize how the way we see something in our past affects who we can become.

For me, practicing our future means much more than that.

More than unique experiences of will power or epiphany, the ways we live today are practicing our future. Each time we talk to another person, or ourselves, sends ripples across the pond of our future selves. How we live affects not only the people whose lives we touch each day, but all the people who will ever know us. We are creating our own paths by either putting our values into practice, or by not practicing them.

The way we speak, or drive, or think, or feel, shapes the person we are becoming. Spiritual practices are not ways to earn more spiritual life, but ways to become more open to spiritual life.

What future are you practicing today?

[Image by juanktru]


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