You can see the past. It is etched in your memory. Events that happened, happened. You experienced those events. You know what happened. You were there. You lived them.
But the future, that is something different. The future is unknown. You haven’t seen it yet. The future is pregnant with potential. It is yet unrealized. You don’t know exactly how it will be, but you can visualize how it may look, and how you may look in it. You can form mental pictures of the indivual you may become. You can identify what it would take to transform you from the individual you are today to the individual you may be in the future.
What is it, exactly, that your future self has that your present self is lacking? What is that certain something that may seed your evolution to become that person you you may become? Try to identify it. And then, if you wish, try to focus your energy to develop it so that you can become the future iteration of your self that you see. That is your Singular Link.
Before the actor Jim Carrey became famous, he wrote himself a check for $10 million and post-dated it five years in the future. Shortly before that date arrived, he landed his first big role in the movie Dumb and Dumber which paid him a sum close to… You guessed it, $10 million. Oprah Winfrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others are reported to have used similar techniques to help them visualize the future versions of themselves.
Even though you haven’t seen your future, you can look at the things that brought you to where you are presently and you can infer the direction they will take you. In other words, you can predict where you will end up if you stay on course.
A simple example is to imagine how you will look in the future. Maybe you have always stood with a slouch. If so, your future self will probably be slouchier. Maybe your face shows creases when you smile. If so, your future face will probably be creasier.
But you can also change your trajectory. Your slouchy self can start standing up straight and your creased-face self can slow time’s etching properties with – well, I don’t know, maybe some lotions or potions or something. I confess ignorance on this topic, but you get the point.
Your visualization can also go beyond your physical features. Maybe you fear you’re stuck in a dead-end job and you’ll be trapped in the same drudgery for years to come. This view of your older self doing the same job can be a powerful motivator for you to work on that résumé.
Using your current trajectory to predict where you’ll end up is a powerful tool. You can use it to either maintain your current course or change course.
Maybe you have recently experienced a growing estrangement from your partner and the current trajectory will probably cause you to part ways. What you should do with this foresight? It’s a question born from the knowledge that you possess the capacity to influence the outcome. You are not just a passive observer of your life as it unfolds on a stage, but rather an observer and an actor in the play itself. In fact, you have the leading role.
Identifying your current trajectory involves connecting the events of your past. It’s like walking backward into a future that you cannot see, and as you look at the landmarks that you pass, you use them to decide if you are moving in the right direction.
Imagine yourself walking backward towards the setting sun. To help navigate you could use the direction of shadows. You could keep an eye on your own shadow at your feet and walk backward in whatever direction keeps your shadow directly in front of you, tacking left or right as may be needed to maintain your course.
Walking backward is precarious because you don’t know what the next step will bring. It’s the same with the uncertainty of decision making. You may be nervous about making the wrong choice. When faced with a high-stakes decision, you may become frozen with apprehension. Your mind may flood itself with what-ifs that cause you to stop in your tracks. This fear stems from the knowledge that when you make a choice, there is a permanency to that action. Once you have chosen one direction, you shut off access to other possibilities that would have otherwise presented themselves if you had chosen a different direction.
You may be confronted with the finality of the decisions you make, and therefore it’s natural to feel some apprehension. Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl advises at moment like this, “Live as if you are already living for the second time, and as if you acted the first time as you are about to act now.” This paradigm asks you to imagine that the present is already past, and that the past may be changed. It implies that you already went through this process previously, you already saw the repercussions of your decision, and you now can use that knowledge to make the decision a second time. It’s like having a time machine. Like having a mulligan, if you need it. This mental exercise may liberate you to choose more freely.
There is a game in which you drop a ball and it falls on a peg and bounces either to the right or the left, and then falls again onto another peg, bouncing again to the right or left, and again and again until it arrives at the bottom. You are like the ball, and the choices you make are like the pegs. Once you make a choice and go right or go left, certain new possible outcomes emerge while others disappear.
When you face a choice, you face a field of potentialities that have not yet been realized. Frankl likens the decision making process to the act of rescuing one potentiality from a field of uncertainty and delivering it permanently into the certainty of your past. I love that image. When you make a decision, you rescue one potentiality from all the other potentialities, and you deliver it like a letter to the mailbox of permanence.
In the walking-backward analogy, what is behind you is an undefined field of uncertainty until you pass it, at which point it becomes part of your fixed field of vision.
On Monday morning when you show up for work, you have not yet made any work-related achievements but all your potential achievements await. By the end of the week, there are no more potential achievements, but rather a bank of realized achievements.
Likewise as you age, your future potential decreases, but your stockpile of realized experiences increases. The youth possess an abundance of energy and little mass; the elderly have mostly mass but little energy. Energy is like the potential for achievement; mass is like the realization of that potential.
Frankl pondered the mysteries of choice during his highly uncertain time as a prisoner of war in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He managed to survive four camps where his statistical probability of surviving was one in 28. He arrived at that calculated probability since 27 out of 28 prisoners did not survive. Their survival hinged on the choices the prisoners made as well as chance developments in their lives. In the the ball-drop game, it’s analogous to there being 28 possible positions where the ball may come to rest, and 27 of them are colored red. Frankl landed in the one spot that was not red.
Frankl observed that the people who believed their lives had a purpose tended to be the ones who survive the hardships of the concentration camps. He believed that his life’s purpose was to recreate the manuscript of the psychology thesis he had written before the war. The only copy of that work had been confiscated when he was imprisoned. He believed he alone could develop that work, and without it, the world would not know the body of existential psychology he had begun to develop called logotherapy.
Others may have had their own deeply personal motivations to survive. In some, it was their devotion to a spouse or child or family member. In others, it was their devotion to god. Those who did not posses a sense of personal mission, Frankl grimly observed, tended to be the ones who did not survive in the concentration camps.
In future postings we’ll explore the idea that your personal mission is, in fact, your Singular Link.