OOO
Home girl is about to head out on holiday!!
I’m quite excited for my upcoming trip (no, I’m currently not on an extended vacation). I’ll be headed up to Queensland (“Queensland”, not “Queenslund”) to visit the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest.
I find this wild. I get to explore the Great Barrier Reef — the world’s largest coral reef — and the Daintree Rainforest, one of the world’s most ancient rainforests, in just a couple of days?! And to think that this was something younger May had only dreamed about, had only seen in geography textbooks, in travel magazines, in nature documentaries. How incredible. How freaking glorious.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about time and how I think about the present and the future. Past me never would’ve imagined living in and exploring Australia - it was always just a fantasy. But that’s what’s funny about time — a lot of times you can’t predict the future because you’re basing your predictions on what’s happened in the past, and the past isn’t always an indicator of what is possible. In a bit of an extreme example, take the atomic bomb. No one could’ve foreseen a dramatic event like that happening and the impact it would have, not just for the course of the Second World War, but also over the global political landscape today.
Nowadays I find myself better able to live more presently, in the sense of being less obsessive about worrying and planning out the future (don’t worry, I still do this to some degree) because something, some unforeseen, unplanned event, could happen today that impacts my future, so how much of the frenetic, anxious planning is needed? Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying I throw any and all planning in the trash (that’s just stupid), but I’m able to better find a balance between living presently and being here with strategizing and preparing for my future.
A big part of this is because I actually experienced life being unexpectedly interrupted by an unforeseen event — I thought I knew what that would be like…and I didn’t. My whole world view was thrown apart and everything I thought and believed and knew to be true was no longer. It was not something I could’ve planned for (I really had to lean in on those corporate “pivot” skills) and the only way to survive (mentally and emotionally) was to take each day one day, really one moment, at a time. As the events of last year showed me - random completely unexpected things can upturn and upheave your life. You can’t plan for those sceanrios because there’s o historical evidence for them to happen, no basis to make that kind of prediction.
It reminds me of Morgan Housel’s philosophy, as espoused in his book Same as Ever, and also makes me think of Gen AI and the role it plays in day-to-day use, whether at home or in the workplace. AI is really good at reviewing, analyzing, and synthesizing data and has gotten to the level of extracting valuable insights in a short blink of an eye. It’s great at making predictions based on data — but that’s just it: it’s great at making predictions based on existing, historical data. It can’t predict random, unexpected events or come up with entirely new and innovative ideas (well, yet) because that’s just the thing: sometimes those future events, ideas, inventions just have no basis from past events or historical data.
Life can throw you an entirely unexpected curveball that you didn’t expect — that’s just life. So don’t waste all of your time worrying over and anxiously planning for the future. Spend some time here. Take a deep breath. Go enjoy the beautiful, amazing, incredible life you have now.