Jam Tomorrow or Memories You Can Cherish?
(Or, Being OK is Just Around the Corner, Honest!)
I will suggest an alternative way to visualise your future later on, but for now, please join me on a journey of what led me to this variation on an old counselling and therapy exercise!
How people visualise what may come in their lives can significantly affect how secure and positively they see themselves today. Imagining a secure future can hugely benefit physical and mental well-being. But what if your okayness today relies too much upon your hopes for the future rather than the different and rarer mindset of a firm belief in a good tomorrow you can actualise? An uncertain hope as a coping mechanism can significantly influence the quality of the only time you can be OK, right now!
Before we continue, I appreciate that there are situations where experiencing a good today is highly challenging to achieve. Much of my early work in sessions with clients, whose experiences have significantly impacted their lives, is about 'Making room to do the work', building an OK-enough today to explore, learn and grow from.
Looking to the future.
Today, tomorrow and yesterday are all linked together in our minds, and our past experiences significantly influence the WAY we look to the future; if we have had a difficult past, we may hope for a better future but will almost always anticipate a challenging one. I first noticed this in my clients who presented with high levels of long-term anxiety; they would say they wanted to 'deal' with their anxiety, but more often than not, what they envisaged was still being anxious but 'managing it better', they would ask for 'tools'; they could not imagine a point in the future without suffering from significantly high anxiety levels.
Imagine a point in the future; it doesn't matter when, and imagine what it will be like. It can be a holiday, meeting, meal, time with a friend or loved one, anything you want. Are you looking forward right now? No, you are actually looking BACKWARDS. When anyone looks to the future, they paint that mental picture with the colours and influences from their past experiences; it's all we have to use. Sometimes, we can use our imagination and ability to extrapolate and anticipate the future pretty well, but we cannot SEE the future. What usually happens is people' forget' the things they predict or anticipate incorrectly and tend to remember the times they get it right-ish, or they will mould a memory to fit. Looking at Confirmation Bias, a Cognitive Behavioural concept and some Transactional Analysis tools such as Racketeering and Discounting can be helpful to learn in reducing this tendency.
In my work, I have also found that imagining a better tomorrow can be helpful, a precursor to taking action to create that better tomorrow; I am mainly talking psychologically and emotionally, of course. Looking forward can be a way to avoid taking action today, procrastination. An example is the raised bed I am building in the yard/garden. It was an old compost heap that the former owner had let go to weeds. For a year, I walked past it, 'I will get that sorted soon', then I realised I was doing just that, walking past it and consigning action to some point in the future. I was doing this based on my experience, in this case, the permissions I had received in childhood to put things off, mixed with a profoundly embedded memory of the chaos that any 'project' brought about. Only when I faced these memories it became clear I was projecting insurmountable difficulty into the future and coping by ignoring it. The oval foundations have been laid, and the inner cement block wall is 80% complete. I am enjoying the physical demands of the job AND looking forward to the problem-solving in getting an outer stone face built. The visualisation I will suggest later has helped me immensely in unchaining myself from projecting my past into my future.
What about today?
It can be pretty challenging to anchor ourselves in the here and now. Apart from our growing cognitive abilities, life over the last two to three hundred years, a mere blink of an eye developmentally, has become significantly more complex. I believe our minds are poorly equipped in some ways yet to deal with our growing mental capacities and their impacts on our lives. We are still learning to separate Now-Then-Future-Here-There in our minds. Transactional Analysis has the concept of the Adult Ego State, where we experience, react, conceptualise and feel in the here and now in response to the here and now. This concept is different in some ways from Mindfulness, but there are overlaps. In my experience, people often attempt to embrace Mindfulness prematurely and before they have a clear picture of whether their perceptions are anchored in the here and now or obscured by past experiences and impacts. My clients are often amazed when they realise how many perceptions and rules they carry around that affect the quality of their days, without ever questioning them, including messages about whether we can be OK today or if contentedness and fulfilment are always a tomorrow away.
Don't get me started on commercialism.
Especially in the Western World, we learn (are pressured often) to be aspirational, to look for a form of better or more, which will surely bring us fulfilment once we acquire it. Depending on the lessons we learned about when it's OK to feel good, be happy or contented, these impacts can result in very conditional and transitional criteria for when it's OK to be OK, and often the new home, car, lavish and more perfect holiday, handy time-saving technology, more perfect self or better relationship will swiftly be taken for granted, grow to be tarnished and unsatisfying, and the search for the better thing tomorrow resumes.
An example of this process comes to mind. After passing on The Liverpool Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy to new owners and relocating to the island I live on now, I noticed the phenomenon of 'Incomers' here. The Islanders are generally friendly, incredibly patient, and wonderfully helpful to Incomers; living here can be a steep learning curve when the usual rules around living in a city or suburbia don't always apply. Islanders can be a little reserved, a bit stand-offish to begin with, not because they are unfriendly but because many Incomers leave the island within two years of arriving. So, a new level of acceptance is shown here only after a couple of years. Sadly, it seems, to many Incomers, Remote Island Living Jam Tomorrow isn't everything many people hope for, but that is my point; it seldom is. I have noticed through casual observation that the people who tend to leave the island quickly appear to be people who seem to be unhappy with themselves when they arrive.
Looking forward ever forward, an Alternative Visualisation.
Many people who have been around the world of therapy, counselling, or coaching will be familiar with the 'look forward' exercise. Typically, you will pick a timeframe, say a few months or even up to five or ten years in the future; then, you write down or draw your vision and desires of that yet-to-be time. Then there will be Discuss - What is Blocking You – Plan – (and if the process is sufficiently skilled) – Mobilisation.
It's healthy to look forward; I often do and enjoy positive anticipation of a future event, not things necessarily; moreso experiences – new memories, even tough times, can bring fond memories and learning. However, there is a risk of falling into a 'Jam Tomorrow' process with the above exercise, a yearning for what could be, maybe one day, life will be better in some way than what we experience now. I find it is an imperfect exercise, often involving some element of the Westernised approach of material accumulation, things more than people or emotional health.
I believe there is a potentially more beneficial way to look at how we see tomorrow: practising a different form of visualisation than the one above.
Framing tomorrow a different way.
I have often looked at the outcome of the look forward exercise, and the only reference to emotional well-being is 'I want to be happy' or some variation of. Of course, happiness is the CONCLUSION or RESULT of many different and highly individual factors and interactions with ourselves and our environment. As noted above, though not always, I notice that material acquisition plays a big part in one's anticipation of being OK, possessions vs. environment and quality relationships. I do see people included in the looking forward exercise, but seldom do people put fine detail on HOW they want those people to be there, 'Loved Ones' or 'Good Friends' are mentioned, but usually without any details of the myriad of conditions that would make them so.
'Jam Tomorrow' came from the Lewis Caroll book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and is taken from Ailces' exchange with the Queen about the present. 'iam' pronounced 'jam', is a Greek word meaning the now. Still, iam or 'jam' could not be there for Ailice because the rule was, ‘jam tomorrow or jam yesterday – but never jam today’, so she could never get what she wanted now.
Eckhart Toll writes extensively on The Power of Now and its significant advantages, and I thoroughly endorse this concept. For all the backwards and forwards looking my work entails, the usual goal is a better quality of NOW. I have realised that the beauty and freedom of 'now' are not to be underestimated in their potential to liberate our hearts and minds. However, understanding the concept and then learning to embrace it are two widely different experiences. We only appreciate the now when we are ready and understand what it means for us individually.
Try this different exercise. It still involves a future tense; however, it can help you look at what you want to be in your life NOW. Visualising what you want to LOOK BACK on in your life from a future standpoint can help you see what you want NOW, not tomorrow or the day after.
The Exercise.
Pick a future point, but this time, mentally turn around and look back into your past; from that position, ask yourself or list or draw an answer to these questions:
What memories do you want to look back on? Go into detail. Even if you go on a luxurious holiday three times a year, that will fill only a tiny percentage of that time; what or who else do you want to remember?
What will be in your memories, who shared your journey, and did you make enough time to include them? Did you have quality time together, or did the companionship count more? Did you eat well and look after your body? Did you take pleasure in the small things in life? How did it feel?
Feelings: What feelings do you wish to reflect upon? Every life has challenges and troublesome times, but have you taken the time or courageously collected the emotions that will enhance your memories? Note: It's not just about joy or contentment, it is OK to 'look back' on how you got angry enough to break out of a problematic situation, for example, or dared to feel pride or previously forbidden sense of self-importance.
What about the small things in your day? Most of life is about our daily experiences, interactions with others, how we sleep, whether we enjoy breakfast or rush it down because other matters are more pressing or seemingly essential, or if we notice the world around us as we go about our day. (BTW, when I finish it, an upcoming blog entry will be on the big con of 'stress management', which may turn into a rant, so I apologise in advance).
I truly believe the small moments in life count for so much more than we realise. If you go forward five years to look back (though I suggest you start with just a year), that's 2629800 minutes. Admittedly, we spend many of those minutes asleep, but that's still many possible experiences.
I hope this exercise helps you visualise life's unpredictable future and path in a new way. I repeat it regularly, say at the beginning of Spring or on the anniversary of losing a loved one, to reflect and reset in the ever-changing now that immediately becomes then.
Whoever is reading this, I hope you have a good tomorrow, a quality of life today, and can look back on yesterday as part of life, with its triumphs, everyday experiences and bested challenges with a sense of pride.
