🔼: [[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 the product of past circumstance and experience, and the same will be true of our future self. That means the secret to getting where we want to be and achieving our [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|Goals]] is working out what experiences and circumstances will get us there – the causes that lead to our desired effects. But it's not so simple, because we are embedded in an [[💡 Interdependence|interdependent]] ecosystem and have no control over the overwhelming majority of our experience. Our [[💡 Parts|Parts]] naturally organize around our [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|Goals]]. They start plotting a course to realizing them and our mind is constantly filtering our senses for relevance; when we're focused on or oriented to something, our mind naturally seeks out and illuminates anything related to it, everything that might be helpful or get in our way. These things take up space in our mind, what we might call our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]]. For simple and immediate goals, this works splendidly. But when the thing we want is highly ambitious or at a far-off distance, the pathway to it becomes increasingly complex and abstract. Our mind fixates on it but struggles to devise a plan. It starts filling up with variables and possibilities, with permutations, with concerns, with possible problems and solutions and what-ifs. But [[🔑 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, change, or influence — which is nearly everything. And so achieving the goal feels as if we've been tasked with shooting an arrow through the eye of a needle, as if our options are too many or too few or non-existent – it tends to put us in [[💡 The Sad Gap|the Sad Gap]]. While our inner-resources are preoccupied with managing all these possibilities and anxieties, we lose sight of everything else – including our agency. And losing sight of our agency is about as good as having none. But all of us have a circle of influence over the present moment and therein lies a surprising, sometimes even frightening amount of power. Doing the next right thing is about orienting to and focusing on the present moment to more clearly see our circle of influence, and then making the best right-now choice rather than devising a perfect a long-term plan, strategy, or solution. This helps to clear our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]] and free up inner-resources that would be otherwise committed to the impossible task of predicting the future. We might consider where we were five years ago. Could we have imagined ourselves where we are now? Could we have planned our lives as they were actually lived? Did life go according to any plans we did make? Has it ever? Some chess players are revered and highly paid for their ability to see, anticipate, and counter their opponents’ moves on an 8x8 board, and computers have been able to outmaneuver the best of them for decades — but this is our life on an inconceivably complex planet with its own emotions and immune system which we call the weather, with eight billion other humans and countless other life forms. We barely understand matter, we know staggeringly little about how our minds work, we struggle to reliably predict the weather — why should we expect ourselves to predict the next five years or even five weeks of our lives? Very few of the best things to ever happen to me were deliberate, and none of them were predicted. The cosmos is too complex, life is too strange. Just because we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Our mind’s inability to discern a path doesn’t mean our destination can’t be reached, it's just not a path we can conceive of – the world is too complex, too strange, too interesting. [[🔑 There are no nouns, only verbs|🔑 The world is always changing]]. Our life, our unique [[💡 Parts|Parts]] and personhood, our unique circumstances, our unique inner and outer resources, in our context at this point in the story of the world has never happened before, and so there is no map to rely on, no authority to appeal to, no footsteps to follow in — nobody knows what’s going on. Our path is singularly ours, but we can’t take it if we don’t have the presence of mind to see it. Most of us have heard the cliche, "I‘ve been 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 a beautiful sunset, an important plot-point, the taste of a meal because we were contemplating a hypothetical future that in all likelihood never actually came to pass? How many objects have we walked into because we were distracted? How many days or years have gone by while we sat seemingly still in front of a screen? How many opportunities have we missed because we were fixated on a far-off destination and lamenting our inability to imagine a clear path? We can get so singularly focused on what we think we want and where we want to go that we’re completely blind to what we could have or where we could go that might be even better. If we aren’t grounded in where we are, we can’t see what paths, what resources, what connections, what cords and levers are right here in front of us. Slow down. [[🔑 As speed decreases, wonder increases]]. Orient to the body, orient to the room, orient to the community. [[Orienting Practices]]. The present moment is where **all** of our power resides, and we’re likely to be surprised at how much we have once we start paying attention. ”The eternal now” is the only thing that exists. Anything else is a maybe, a hypothetical, an abstraction, a fantasy, a daydream (though [[🔑 We need Nothing|🔑 those have value too]]). When we detach from dreaded or desired outcomes and destinations, slow down, zoom in, and [[🕯️ Grounding|🕯️ ground ourselves]] in the present moment, our [[💡 Cognitive Load|Cognitive Load]] is dropped and our inner resources and creativity become available to us. [[🔑 As speed decreases, wonder increases|🔑 We can see what's actually in front of us]] — potentialities, opportunities, resources, connections, and even relationships that we couldn't before. It may seem like there's just one path to get where we want to go, one that involves shooting an arrow through the eye of a needle; we may have the impression that we couldn’t possibly make it because whatever it was that helped others get there, we don’t have it. But there are as many ways to a destination as there are travelers. If we re-focus on the present moment, what was once dormant can become freshly illuminated and take up the now-cleared space, and [[🔑 awareness is a prerequisite to change]]. We might notice several doors that we could easily step through, and learn there are many ways to get to the same place. Sometimes doors appear where we once saw walls. But we might also see the window, the crawlspace, the trap door under the rug, a hidden door behind a bookshelf; it may dawn on us to use a forgotten hammer to put a just-big-enough hole in the wall to get out. If we're walking along and find a boulder in our way, it's easy to label it a block, a setback, or an interruption. But the boulder isn't blocking the path – the path just includes a boulder and takes us through a briar patch for a time. > “Man plans, and God laughs.” We don’t have to devise the perfect plan or find the perfect path — the path is already perfect, it just isn’t going to match our imagination or preferences because we can’t predict the future and we can’t control much of anything. Setbacks and interruptions are what we call moments when our expectations don’t match reality. If we can’t predict the future, we don’t have to try to. Rather than expecting or wondering if things will go according to plan, drop the plan and just see what happens, approach life as an exploration. We can stop trying to control the waves and learn to surf – agency is found by focusing on what we can influence in an ocean we have no power over. Unlike when we’re fixated on outcomes and what we can’t control, when we do the next right thing, moment-to-moment, we end up with the best possible outcome that was ever available to us in the first place. We will reach the point to where from the outside it looks as if we’ve shot an arrow through the eye of a needle because every opportunity we took was “me”-shaped, we took opportunities unique to us. We didn’t follow *the* path, life cannot be standardized. We discovered and met with *ours* — the path only once travelled, which no one else could have fit through. We took leaps of faith, letting go of one hand-hold before grasping the next, asked for and accepted help when we needed it, and allowed people to show up for and surprise us. Detaching from outcomes doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning [[🛠️ Goals and Intentions|Goals]] or intentions, it means abandoning expectations. Our goal is a kind of north star, and the next right thing is whatever we deem it to be in consideration of what inner and outer resources we have available to us in the now. We can keep the goal 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 looks like moving further away from it. What is meant to be, will be. Be present, stay here, and trust that tomorrow will get here all on its own; trust that [[🔑 Small choices are big|🔑 good seeds grow]] and learn to enjoy gardening. We may not end up with a perfect harvest, but it will be the best harvest possible. In fact, there’s a real possibility that what we end up with will be more interesting and more beautiful than anything we would even have thought to ask for. We could not have imagined our life as it was lived; the same is true of our future, several times over when we do the next right thing. Sometimes doing the next right thing looks like having a tough conversation. Or asking for help, or [[🕯️ Movement and Exercise 👟|🕯️ movement]], or [[⭐️ Rest and Restoration|⭐️ rest]]. It might look like reading a book that's actually relevant to where we are right now. Or a [[🛠 Self-Massage]]. It can look like following our [[Intuition]] when it may go against our previous learnings or what we've been taught is “normal” or "good" or what our original plan was. Sometimes it means [[🕯️ Doing Nothing|🕯️ doing nothing at all]] for a time. The options seem endless because 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. Doing the next right thing is all we’ve ever really been able to do. And if it’s all we can do, then anything else is a distraction. Any energy we expend on what we can’t control is a waste of our time and resources (though we may have to expend some to figure that out), and [[🔑 the right thing, at the wrong time, is the wrong thing]]. So don’t get distracted. If you can't change it, drop it if you can. Not because it isn't important to the world or to you, 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 you closer to resolving it. It just saps your inner-resources. Make a habit of grounding into the present moment and considering: what’s the next right thing? What’s the best I can do with what I have *right now, in this moment* — not tomorrow, not in ten minutes, but **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? What's something I can do right now to move in the right direction? By doing the next right thing we can draw each line, write each sentence, make each choice, speak each word, love each soul, live each moment as impeccably as we’re able. The future will get here on its own. Right now, just do the next right thing. ###### See Also - Thought experiment, the switch of forgetting. - [[🔑 Everyone everywhere is doing their best all the time]]. - [[🔑 Listen to your body]] - [[🔑 Tell and act the truth (when you can)]] - [[🔑 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 re-direction]] - [[🔑 There is no such thing as failure]] - [[💡 Process Mindset|Process Mindset]] - [[Weaponized Despair]] - One day at a time. - We can do anything for 24 hours - [[🛠️ Navigation Journal]] [^1]: