4115: [Part 2] Three Typical Mistakes in Thinking About the Future by David Cain of Raptitude on Mindful Living

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[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_00] This is Optimal Living Daily. Three Typical Mistakes in Thinking About the Future, Part 2 by David Cain of Raptitude.com. And I'm Justin Malik, the guy that reads to you every single day of the year. Now today's episode is part two of a longer post. If you didn't catch part one yesterday, I'd recommend listening to that first. But if you're all caught up, let's get right to part two and continue optimizing your life.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_00] Three Typical Mistakes in Thinking About the Future, Part 2 by David Cain of Raptitude.com. Your problems aren't real till they're right there in the room with you. It's easy to become convinced that you have problems lying there in the future, even if it's just this afternoon or tomorrow. In New Zealand, I spent two months working in kiwi orchards. It's widely known to be grueling, messy work.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_00] The night before my first day, I must have heard a dozen horror stories from other backpackers about how my arms would burn, how I'd get poked in the face with twigs all day, how the auditors would scream at me for being too fast or too slow, and how the sheer monotony of it would scrape away at my sanity as the days went on. Many of the new recruits were thoroughly traumatized before they even set foot in an orchard. Ordinarily, I probably would have joined in their collective dread, but I was feeling supremely centered those first weeks into poke, and I didn't play the game.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_00] I refused to suffer from all this talk. If tough moments were on their way, I'd wait till they were in front of my face before I greeted them. Quote, Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. William Prescott Whatever difficulties you think you have, they aren't real till they're in the room with you, and you won't know what form they'll take until they are. The job interview that's making you nervous, or the difficult conversation you need to have with your boss, any expectations of trouble brewing?

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_00] Don't let yourself suffer over them till they come over the horizon through the real world into your physical presence. They may never arrive at all, and if they do, they can't possibly be quite what you pictured if you aren't a bona fide psychic. My arms did burn. The auditors did give me a hard time. I did get leaf bits in my eyes and scrapes all over my forearms. But not until I was really there with a bag on my back and my hands in the vines.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_00] I thought the worst thing was the odd pocket of sitting rainwater dripping down the side of my face. It sucked, but not in the way I thought. The work was plenty unpleasant, but I wasn't going to let that suffering spill out onto the rest of my day. On our morning commute through the countryside, even when my workmates were fretting about the grueling workday to come, I refused to indulge any thoughts I had about it being something to dread. Rural New Zealand is stunning. It was almost always sunny. I smiled inside the whole way. I miss those drives.

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_00] All the suffering is in the thoughts. About 10 days into my orchard career, I discovered the secret to dealing with the mental torment of endless physical work. I didn't bother with thinking. My body needed to be active, but not my mind. Anytime I noticed I was thinking about the end of the day, my paycheck, my next meal, telling off the auditors, I shushed my mind like a rude moviegoer. I just stared at my hands as they plucked the kiwis and they simply carried on with the work, as if they belonged to someone else.

[00:04:15] [SPEAKER_00] Picking four kiwis, two in each hand, was always pretty easy no matter how tired my body was, and I never had to do any more than that. By the end of each day, I'd have picked thousands, but I never needed to do anything more difficult than raise my arms and put them down again. At no time did I raise them a thousand times, only ever once, because I didn't let my poor mind do the work. Thought allows us to stack problems into completely unmanageable loads.

[00:04:41] [SPEAKER_00] In only a few minutes, you can think of 50 things you have to do tomorrow, and in those dosages, thoughts can overwhelm you. You can't sort out that mess any better than you can catch 50 baseballs at once. When tomorrow actually comes around the corner, it will present itself in a different format than your thoughts did. Instead of an avalanche of freely associated images and emotions, it will greet you as a slower and markedly calmer, continuous reel of unfolding events. In each scene, you'll do whatever you can with what actually happens.

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_00] All the suffering is in the thoughts. When you think about a problem at any time and you can't actually act on it, you suffer. So if it's in the future, don't treat it like a problem. Problems only happen in front of your face in real time. Court possibilities, but don't mark them as problems, as items worthy of fear. You can't get there from here. I woke up this morning with a feeling of dread. I was thinking of a challenging task I had to do today, and five or six of its possible outcomes,

[00:05:40] [SPEAKER_00] and how I'd respond to each, and what repercussions they might create in my life, and what I should have done differently in the past to avoid having to do this task, and which of my habits are destroying me, and how I can possibly deal with them, and what I would say to somebody who asked me how I felt about all this, and how I'll never let this happen to my children, and dot dot dot. At some point, I noticed my lips were actually moving in response to an imagined person in an imagined conversation that might, through some paranoid convoluted sequence of events,

[00:06:08] [SPEAKER_00] actually happen if certain fears were to come true. I was trying to solve a problem that was about 17 steps down the road, all because I mistook my thoughts for genuine problems that were waiting for me out there somewhere. The people of Maine, I'm told, are fond of saying, oh, you can't get there from here when asked for directions. It's a peculiar answer, but it's not a dumb one. I was trying to get there from here. I was trying to solve my whole life while I was still lying in bed staring at the ceiling fan.

[00:06:35] [SPEAKER_00] There is certainly a there, but it isn't anything until it becomes a here. Don't deal with there until it gets here. Not that there's any way you could. You just listened to part two of the post titled, Three Typical Mistakes in Thinking About the Future by David Cain of raptitude.com. And I'll be right back with my commentary. Every time I go in for a physical, they run a dozen markers, and I walk out with the same sentence,

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[00:08:26] [SPEAKER_00] Limited time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you at dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. Thank you again to David. Some great quotes in there like, Whatever difficulties you think you have, they aren't real till they're in the room with you and you won't know what form they'll take until they are.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_00] I think intuitively this is pretty easy to understand but very difficult to practice because in many cases we've trained our minds for years and years to stir in negative thoughts, trying to solve everything in our heads, which often gets us nowhere. I'm sure you've experienced this before where you planned everything that could go wrong, wasting tons of time in anxious and negative thoughts, only to have it go well. Or maybe it didn't even go well,

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_00] but all those thoughts actually didn't help with anything. So this all might make sense on the surface, but when it comes down to it, we're still getting sucked into that same cycle over and over. That's why both are important. The awareness that this is happening, but also the actual putting it into practice. I mentioned meditation yesterday because that's one that I'm most familiar with to sort of break free from this spiral of negativity, but that's not the only way.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_00] I consider listening to this show a sort of meditative practice in a way. It's a constant reminder, daily reminder for us to continue thinking about these things. So when it does happen, we can do what David did and tell our minds to slow down if we choose. Having that option is really important. Without that option, we're chained to wherever the monkey mind chooses to go. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, it's often working against us actually.

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_00] So hopefully this podcast is helping with that and in other areas of your life. I know it's helping mine. Have a great rest of your day and start to your week. Thank you for listening every day and optimizing your life with me. And I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.