What’s Your Temporal Orientation?
Leveraging the power of past, present, and future thinking
Temporal orientation is a psychological construct defined by whether a person focuses on the past, present, or future. Since temporal orientation can profoundly influence your emotional state, I am offering some guidance for identifying and managing yours to facilitate your best life.
I have lived in the future for much of my life. My mind fixated on a future state that often featured more things, better experiences, and peak happiness. I am fortunate to be mildly forgetful of the mundane, easily releasing past hurts, thereby rendering presence and forward thinking a near default state.
After seven years of meditation and mindfulness practice punctuated by a pandemic, during which I doubled down on stillness, I now live in the present. I can tell you that the Buddhists are onto something with the notion that you joy resides in the here and now, versus in some future state.
Any time we anchor our happiness on a future condition or expectation, we deprive ourselves of joy today. As the dearly departed Tibetan Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh taught us, the seed of our happiness is always available, we just choose to punt it into the unpredictable future versus planting it in the ever-present current moment.
