A Middle Piece (Part 4 of 4)

Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3    |    Part 4

Creating the Future

In their book, The Three Laws of Performance, authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan discuss the idea of a default future: “Our default future consists of our expectations, fears, hopes, and predictions, all of which are ultimately based on our experience in the past.  Incidents from the past live on as prediction, giving us our default future.”  When you don’t see the present moment (and all of your past for that matter) as just one possible outcome, you get drawn into it and it feels like what you have is all that’s possible.  Life has that quality of being “just the way it is” and it’s all it’s every going to be.

What robs you of joy and effectiveness in life is not that something is missing about you or your life.  It’s not the lack of something; it’s the addition of something – a default future.  As Zaffron and Logan tell us your default future is just your past resurrected.  Masked as your default future, your past becomes the lid that seals you tightly into a box you’ve created – the box called your life.  But as we’ve seen, it’s all an illusion.  This is not the true nature of things.  There is no default future.  There is no lid.  There is no future.  There’s just what you’re creating in this present moment.

This doesn’t mean that there are no limits to life.  Any box you create exists inside a bigger box labeled “Life” and life certainly has limits.  If you look though, you really don’t need to worry about the limits of life.  For most of us anyway, the things we want are not outrageous demands of life.   We’re not looking to press the limits of life.  We’re just looking to have a satisfying life experience.  For that, all you need to do is to master taking the lid off, see the illusion of your default future and then invent a future that gives life to your life. 

The point of this series wasn’t to reveal the secret of life.  It was only to distinguish a piece of the puzzle that often goes overlooked.  I think it’s an important piece, a key even, but it’s certainly not the only one.  It is though one of those more challenging pieces of the puzzle to see and fit in place.  

You know, not an edge piece … a middle piece.