Balancing Your Future With Your Present

Last week I wrote a blog post about the importance of having vision for your life. I got a really good response from readers, which was great. A few people commented on the post, suggesting that while vision for your future is important, it's a greater priority to be at peace with your life and enjoy the 'moment'. This is a sentiment that I fully support. If you can't enjoy where you are in the moment then you're on a one way road to ruin.

Vision for the future and a recognition of what you have now are complimentary, there should be a balance between the two. A balance where you strive to meet your ambitions whilst enjoying your life in the moment. Without vision, your life can become stale, and without an appreciation of the moment, your life becomes hollow.

I mentioned before that I am a carer for my wife, who has a chronic illness. When illness impacts your life, like it does ours, it can become easy to put your life on hold. For the longest time, we did this exact thing. We, in effect, were stuck in a place where we were waiting for our lives to begin.

There's an element of wisdom in this. You have to be realistic about what you can do when sickness has such a massive impact on you. You get to a point, however, when you realise that you can't sit back and wait, for years, for your situation to improve, when it might never change. We learnt that we can't just look to the future, we had to enjoy where we were at present.

We work hard to strike the balance between having vision for the future and enjoying the present. To maintain this balance, even the simplest things can make all the difference. Me and my wife have a vision board in our house and then make sure that at least once a week we have a 'date day' where we focus on each other in that moment.

What do you do to make sure you strike that critical balance between having a vision for the future, and making the most of every single moment?

Fighting Talk: Hardship

“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”

― C.S. Lewis

When you're in a fight, you have to expect that you're going to take some punches. They're going to hurt, and they might just knock you on your backside. The blows you take will make you strong.

I don't think that it's a coincidence that people who achieve incredible things, have often gone through hardship which prepared them. Just look at some of the great men and women of history. Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Freda Carlo and Henry Ford all either failed, or suffered great hardships, before their destiny was realised. 

When I go through hardship, I try to remind myself of this quote. Frankly, It's not easy. Eventually I start to believe it. When I believe it, I get excited. I'm excited to see where all this hardships will lead. The greater my hardships, the greater my destiny will be.

Fighting Talk: Dignity in Victory

"Never give up, never give in, and when the upper hand is ours, may we have the ability to handle the win with the dignity that we absorbed the loss"

There's an impressive amount of wisdom in this sentence, and it needs little description. In fact, I'm going to keep my contribution short, there's nothing I can write to make the statement more impacting.

I'm going to keep these words in my mind this week. Remember, I spoke of using words like a shield. When I feel under pressure this week, I will remind myself to never give in.

Will you fight this week? And when you gain the upper hand, will you do so with dignity?

Fighting talk: Fighting To Get Back Up

"It's not whether you get knocked down that counts, it's whether you get up"

Over the past few months, I've taken a few hits and I've been knocked down. My depression has been at its worst. I've gone from sickness to sickness and have felt physically broken. I've even had to take the decision to re-sit my final year of university. I effectively buckled under the pressure of being a full time student, a carer and working a part-time job.

Despite everything, I'm fighting to get back up.

I know that it doesn't matter how many times I get knocked down in life. What matters is that I will always choose to get back up and contend to stay on my feet.

A few weeks ago a wise friend reminded me that just because you might be struggling in life, it doesn't mean that you're failing. If you're struggling, then you're still fighting. If you're fighting, then you haven't lost yet.