Imagine you have a goal to accomplish, but things stood in your way. You have to do something else with yourself but you still wish that you were doing that goal, you still wish you could have accomplished this goal. Do you know what you’re doing to yourself? You are living in the past.
More than that, when we focus completely on the past or totally on the future, you are allowing your thoughts to control you. We need to learn on how to stop allowing our brain to make us a zombie. When you are a zombie, you are moving by a force of doing.
You’re not really living. Your eyes are fixed on one target and cannot move forward. Why not become a more balanced person and just “Be” or in other words, a person who observes their thoughts but is not controlled by them.
You need to remember, this is not an easy task. This is a hard thing in fact. It means that one has to “Let go” of the very fear of the future and the very fear of the past. It involves allowing yourself to love you and trust yourself so completely that you can let your thoughts fly in and out like clouds going in a sky.
To live in the now, you must allow yourself to not feel you are less of a person if your expectations are not met. That’s hard for any such person. How do you do that? I mean I have met many people who are afraid of people judging them if they do something they’ve never done before.
That includes me. I was going to a dance class, I hadn’t been in any formal ballroom dance classes EVER. As I went in with Michael, it was mind boggling that he signed up for not absolute beginner! He had taken ballroom in school, so he wanted something better. However, when I told him I was not comfortable with this, he told me, “Ah, you’ll get it and do fine, I’ll help you and you’ll do fine.”
I assumed I could do it. I assumed that I would be able to do anything as long as my husband and I were together. When the teacher called, “Switch” after a few minutes, I was set up to dance with a woman. I didn’t know if I was the man.
She tried to take charge but I didn’t get what she was doing. She walked up to the dance instructor and told the teacher, rather loudly, “She doesn’t get it and I wash my hands of her.”
I was so embarrassed. The teacher tried to show me but couldn’t focus merely on one student. He walked away.
My husband on the other hand was having a great time. I was upset. I was embarrassed. I was annoyed that he was having a great time because he knew mostly what he was doing and I had little to no idea. I left the class. I went behind a curtain and cried away.
I wouldn’t even participate in the other class. What made me more upset was my husband didn’t come after me! I expected him to. However, he kept going.
Now do you hear between the lines? Expectation. Michael expected me to have gone to dance classes previously…though I had never gone to a real one. He expected me to get it. I expected he would stay with me not that we would switch partners. I expected him to follow me when I became overwhelmed.
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Expectation leads you to become a zombie. You let the negative monster deposit negative emotions in your brain and you run on the negativity. It drives you. So let’s look at my situation. My assumptions and his assumptions caused negative reactions that shouldn’t have been.
I never went back to those dance classes. I never went back because of those expectations that weren’t met. I never felt comfortable to go back. Now, should I go back? Probably—I should try it again. However, if I was to look for dance classes, it would be going in knowing all that would be going on.
So, how do you live for the moment? Let go, stop thinking so hard and assuming that your expectations always have to be met. When you put expectations on how things should go, you set people up to disappoint you. When you expect everything will go perfect and it doesn’t, change your plan and find something that can still make you happy.
Had I have left Michael and went to the easier dance class, I bet you I would have had more fun.
Savor the present. The goal may have been to get to the top of the mountain. Imagine spraining your knee. Savor the amount of progress you made. Taste the joys that are around you of the people you were with and the fun you had. Smell small victories made all around you.
Love and savor all the “Now” moments with the ones you love, even if they don’t go your way. I had a time when I was trying to make it home for supper and I took the wrong bus. My family waited for me to come home for three hours. I told them what had happened. Although I didn’t get to eat supper with everyone, I had a great conversation with my father while we cleaned up.
Allow your life to flow…stop always putting time constraints on things. When you put a time constraint on everything you do (For example, a tightly knit schedule that has no breathing room whatsoever) you don’t allow yourself to fully enjoy that moment.
When one allows themselves to be able to—let’s say paint for a good hour or more, their creation becomes beautiful. If you say I have to finish this in fifteen minutes, your painting looks like crap. Take time to do things.
When something bothers you, face it, don’t turn your back on it. There is nothing worse for a person than burying what is wrong with them. Don’t be embarrassed about it, improve it. Work hard at it, tame it. Learn to love all parts of you including the parts of you that you dislike about yourself.
Finally, it’s okay not to know everything. People with ADHD tend to forget where they put their keys. They forget things they wanted to bring with them. It is alright to get distracted every now and then or to need a cue to get back on track. You have to accept that part of you as well. It is who you are.
Anyway, I have gotten rather distracted today. I have to move on to things of importance but it was fun living for the moment. I am Stephanie, I have ADHD, I am striving to lower my expectations of others, and learn to slow down and live for the moment.