What ifs don't empower us - they deplete us

​I am built to move forward. Like, there's this invisible little gear shift inside me always set on "D" - just drive dude.

But - I think, there's also an invisible little gear shift in life that is always set on "N" - as in NO, no way am I'm not going to make it easy for you to just go forward. It's like I'm in this unspoken conflict with life - I know my best days are ahead of me - I can see those days; yet, life is determined to keep me stuck where I am.

Or - maybe worse - life stays busy trying to jam my invisible little gear shift into reverse.

It's cruel, in a way, how life does that. It uses my own mind against me. It uses clever little tricks to anchor me in the past. Life knows when it does that - the motor inside me stuck on drive - will simply spin its wheels and eventually burn out.

One of those tricks is the way life constantly invites me to wonder, "what if" this or "what if" that had been different.

What if I'd responded differently to that conversation?
What if I'd showed up instead of stayed home?
What if I'd taken that job and not this one?
What if I'd never taken that first drink?

What if. What if. What if.

Life never runs out of opportunities to point us to our past and beg us to rewrite it. It never runs out of ways to tempt us into believing that if we'd just done this differently, or just looked at that from a different angle, our life would be a much more beautiful picture than it is today.

Life wants us to believe that if we ponder that long enough we can know the answer. We can actually come to know how life would have turned out if we'd just done things differently. Because life knows, if it can get us to believe that, it can keep us stuck blaming ourselves for what we didn't become instead of letting that gear shift run wild into the future we are meant to see.

The reality is - there is no answer to what if. Equally true, there is no changing the ifs we wonder about. Not one single one of them.

I told someone the other day that when I go there, when I go to "what if" - oh, I still get stuck there. My engine roars, the wheels spin, the mud flies, and I can feel the motor dying. I feel all of me being depleted.

But - I said - the good news is I just don't go there as often as I used to. Because when I feel life begging me to ask "what if" - I'm trying to ask myself a different question these days: I ask "what is".

What is happening right here and right now? I have full control over this moment that is, right now - what am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with this moment, to add fuel to the me stuck in drive, a life full of natural instinct to move forward in this world?

Many days I struggle with the right answer to that. But I get better each day at eliminating a wrong answer. And that wrong answer is: "what if?"