🔼: [[Organizing Principles]] ###### 🔑 Do the next right thing > "If you take care of the minutes, the years take care of themselves." > — Rick Hansen Who and where we are is a product of past circumstances, choices, and experience, and the same will be true of our future selves. This means that the secret to being who and where we want to be is working out what experiences, choices, and circumstances will make it inevitable — the causes that lead to our desired effects. Only it’s not so simple. We’re not who and where we are just because of us. We didn’t get here on our own, it took all 13.8 billion years of cosmological history for us to get here. We’re here because our ancestors were there, woven into in the same [[💡 Interdependence|interdependent]], multi-dimensional web that we find ourselves in now. We are an ecosystem embedded in other ecosystems and have no control over most of our experience. All the different [[💡 Parts|parts of us]] naturally organize around our [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|Goals]]. They plot a course to their realization (or their avoidance) and our mind begins to filter our senses for relevance, seeking out and illuminating anything that might be helpful or get in our way. For simple and immediate goals, this works. But when what we want is ambitious or at a far-off distance, the path becomes evermore complex and abstract and our mind struggles to devise a clear plan to get us there. Our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]] swells with variables, permutations, concerns, what-ifs, and work-arounds, and [[🔑 the mind can only hold so much]]. Feelings of helplessness, despair, and overwhelm often arise when we spend much time [[💡 Focus & Concentration|focusing]] on what we can't solve, predict, or influence — which is nearly everything. These fixations pull us out of the present moment and into [[💡 The Sad Gap|the Sad Gap]], which causes us to lose sight of our agency, and losing sight of our agency is about as good as having none. But we all have an immediate circle of influence, and therein lies a surprising, sometimes even frightening amount of power. Doing the next right thing is about starting where we are and taking our best next step rather than trying to come up with or adhere to a perfect long-term plan. This helps to clear our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]], free up inner-resources, and lead to best possible outcomes. > “*Man makes plans, God laughs.*” You might consider where you were five years ago. Could you have imagined yourself where you are now? Could you have planned your life as it was actually lived? Did life go according to what plans you did make? Has it ever? Professional chess players are revered, even *idolized* for their planning and foresight, but that’s on an 8x8 board. Meanwhile, this is *our life*, on an inconceivably complex, living planet with its own emotions and immune system which we call the weather, with eight billion other humans and countless other lives, and [[🔑 Everything is connected to everything else|🔑 we are connected to all of it]]. Not to mention, we don’t know much, even about our own minds. Why should we expect ourselves to predict even next five days of our lives when computers have been beating even the best chess players for decades, when we struggle to reliably predict the weather? The cosmos is too complex and life is too strange for such precision; nobody *really* knows what’s going on. But our inability to predict our journey doesn’t mean the destination is unreachable or that the worst is a certainty. [[🔑 There are no nouns, only verbs|🔑 The world is always changing]]. Our life, our [[💡 Parts|Parts]] and personhood, our circumstances, our inner and outer resources, in our current context at this point in the story of the world has never happened before and will never happen again. There is no map to trace, no authority to appeal to, no text to follow to the letter, no footsteps to follow in — our path is singularly ours. But we can’t take the next wise step if our mind is fixated on a far-off fantasy. And if we try to, we’re likely to trip. Most of us have heard the cliche of being "so caught up in what I couldn't have that I couldn't see what was right in front of me." How many times have we missed something beautiful, an important plot-point, the taste of a meal because we were focused elsewhere? How many times have we walked into something because we were distracted? How many days or years have gone by while we sat seemingly still in front of a screen? What else might we miss if we’re forever fixated on laying out a perfect hypothetical path to an inflexible goal? When we stop trying to control and strategize, when we detach from dreaded or desired outcomes, [[🕯️ Grounding|🕯️ ground ourselves]], and land in the present moment, our inner resources and [[☀️ Creativity]] become available to us. [[🔑 As speed decreases, wonder increases|🔑 We can see what's actually in front of us]], even new things we couldn't before, and [[🔑 Awareness can catalyze change|🔑 that awareness catalyzes change]]. It’s easy to get the impression there's just one path to get where we want to go, or that we couldn’t possibly make it because whatever it was that got others there, we don’t have it. But just as we couldn’t have predicted our life as it was lived, which got us here, we can’t know what will get us there. We can do everything “right” and still fail; we can make countless mistakes and stumble into success. There are many ways to get to the same place. If we're driving along and find a fallen tree on the road, it's easy to label it a block, a setback, or an interruption. But the tree isn't *actually* blocking the path, the path just includes navigating around a fallen tree. ”Block,” “setback,” and ”interruption” are labels we assign to the moments when our plans and expectations don’t match reality. We were unwittingly projecting a fantasy. The fact that we can’t predict the future means we can stop trying to. Rather than following a plan, follow a [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|north star]] or an intention and just see what happens, approach life as an exploration. We can keep our intention in the back of our mind and trust that our moment-to-moment choices are magnetizing it toward us, even though sometimes progressing toward something means moving further away from it for a time — the road is never straight and often convoluted. Agency is found by focusing on what we can influence, in learning to surf an ocean we have no power over, on doing the next right thing. And the funny thing is, when we take the best next step moment-to-moment, we end up with the best possible outcome we could have gotten in the first place — it *might* even be better than anything we would have had the gumption to ask for. With practice it allows us to draw each line, write each sentence, make each choice, speak each word, love each soul, live each moment as impeccably as we’re able because we’re not pouring our inner-resources into anything but what’s right in front of us, into what we can actually influence. Eventually from the outside it looks as if we’ve shot an arrow through the eye of a needle because we continuously stepped through doors we could never have planned and might never have seen if we were fixated on our expectations and projected fantasies about the way things “[[💡 Should Statements|should]]” be going, or what the path “should” look like. We can be so focused on what we think we want that we might completely miss something better, something bespoke, something truly unique. It can be worthwhile to drop [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|Goals]], intentions, and strategies altogether or at least to hold them lightly. If we can't change it, we might see if we can [[Detachment|drop it]]. Not because it isn't important to the world or to us, not because it isn't worthy of attention and care, not because it isn’t a noble cause, but because focusing on it doesn’t get us closer to resolving it — it just pulls us away from our agency; turn your attention toward what ground you’ve got and do the next right thing. The present moment is where **all** of our power resides because it’s the only thing that actually exists. Right now is all we've got, and the next right thing is the best we've ever been able to do. The good news is, that means anything else is a waste of our time and resources which can instead be poured into practicing, even mastering what we can actually influence in the present moment. Further still, there's often much more available to us in the present than we realize – [[🔑 As speed decreases, wonder increases|🔑 we just have to slow down enough to see it]]. Each of us is uniquely positioned to offer something to and engage the world in a way no one else can, through our unique gifts and circumstances, through our unique opportunities to bring truth, beauty, and goodness to the world. Some candles can only be lit by you. >”*Start where you are. >Use what you have. >Do what you can.*” >— Arthur Ashe Don’t try to start where you aren’t, don’t try to use what you don’t have, don’t try to do or control what you can’t. The next right thing is unique to the present moment of a life that only we can live, so deferring to others is typically unhelpful beyond sharing experience and resources. When we attune to our best next step, there’s a sense of being almost guided — to people, places, works of art, [[Practices 🕯️]], or actions to take. Ask yourself, and *feel* for an answer: >"*Tend to the part of the garden you can touch.*" >– [[👤 Jack Kornfield]] - What’s the next right thing? - What is life asking of me right now? - What do I feel moved to explore more deeply at this point in my life? - Where do I want to put my [[⭐️ Attention]] right now? - What do I need right now? - If my life were a novel and the present moment were a chapter in the story, what would I want the character to do next? - What would future me wish that current me to do today? We might even feel like we’re very close to something even without measurable evidence. We might trust this and find that things don’t go our way, and then find that it was the best thing that could possibly have happened to us. Trust that [[🔑 Small choices are big|🔑 good seeds grow]] and just start gardening. The rest will take care of itself. ###### See Also <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sr6LMr-rXEc?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> - Thought experiment, the switch of forgetting. - ”Don’t know, don’t need to know.” - [[🔑 Everyone everywhere is doing their best all the time]]. - [[🔑 Listen to your body]] - [[🔑 Tell and act the truth]] - [[🔑 Small choices are big]] - [[🔑 We can’t do everything]] - [[🔑 Be mindful of anti-North Stars]] - [[🔑 Focusing on something can increase the likelihood of the outcome]] - [[🔑 Healing is no one person's responsibility]] - [[🔑 Rejection is course-correction]] - [[🔑 There is no such thing as failure]] - [[🔑 The right thing, at the wrong time, is the wrong thing]]. - [[💡 Process Mindset|Process Mindset]] - [[Weaponized Despair]] - One day at a time. - We can do anything for 24 hours - [[🛠️ Navigation Journal]] - [[💡 Wu Wei]] - [[Detachment]] - [[Orienting Practices]] [^1]: