Lately my posts have spun around thoughts of living for today and acknowledging that the future is not set in stone. That I’m a twenty-something year-old and should enjoy it because tomorrow I am one step closer to not being that. It’s not random. I live now, not yesterday and not tomorrow. The future has potential and I dance towards it on no certain terms. But my destiny is not my fate, my goals change as my path evolves and my path changes as my goals evolve.
In the commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 he made a beautiful point.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
It can be simple to look at your past and realize how or why you got to where you are. It is impossible to plan your actions and their consequences to get you to an exact moment in the future. There are too many uncontrollable factors. Each step you take moves you in a direction and that direction is always forward simply because it cannot be backwards. But forwards isn’t straight and the number of paths that branch from your steps are immeasurable.
All of this renders the word mistake useless. There is no way to tell what direction your step really takes you until it has been taken and the consequences have occurred. There is no way to tell when the consequences stop reverberating.
What a freeing idea. To think that your future has yet to unfold and with each breath you take it changes. It seems frightening, as if you are lost before you have started. But you will always have secure ground because you have left a trail. You are leaving a trail. And in five minutes, tomorrow, a year from now, on your death bed you will recognize the steps you made and realize how solid your path has always been.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc?rel=0&w=600&h=450]
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