Have you ever noticed how quickly the mind travels ahead?
Something happens today and almost immediately we begin imagining what comes next.
We picture the conversation. We decide how someone will respond. We think about what we will say if they come back, if the opportunity appears, if the same situation circles around again.
And most of the time, we build that future from what has already happened.
There is a kind of protection in this. If we can imagine what is coming, maybe we can prepare for it. Maybe we can avoid an old hurt or make sure things turn out differently this time. We may never consciously think about it that way. We simply find ourselves trying to make the unknown a little more certain.
We take the person we knew yesterday and place them into tomorrow.
We do the same with ourselves.
I see this often in the people who come to me. Someone may be sitting in the middle of a relationship that has changed, wondering what will happen if that person returns. She may already be thinking through every possible conversation, preparing herself for the same behaviors, the same emotions, the same dynamic.
Yet while she is doing that, something is already happening.
She is changing.
Maybe she has spoken more honestly than she ever has before. Maybe she has finally heard herself say what she wants. Maybe something that once felt acceptable now feels completely different in her body.
The experience itself is changing her.
And somewhere else, the other person is living through it too.
We rarely know what another person is doing with the words we have spoken, the absence they now feel, or the experience they are moving through. Sometimes change happens so quietly that even the person changing barely recognizes it.
I think of a chisel against a piece of stone.
A little falls away.
Then a little more.
And over time something begins to appear that was difficult to see before.
Life does this with us.
A conversation changes something. An experience opens something. We suddenly hear ourselves differently. We recognize a pattern while we are standing inside it. We choose something differently and only afterward realize how much we have changed.
So when we take an old experience and carry it straight into the future, we leave something important out.
The present.
This moment is doing something.
It is shaping what comes next because it is shaping us.
That does not mean we erase what we have learned from the past. Our experiences give us wisdom. They show us where something felt good, where we lost ourselves, where we found ourselves, where we want to stand differently now.
We can bring that wisdom here without turning yesterday into a prediction.
There is a difference.
One keeps us connected to what we know now.
The other has us living inside a future that has yet to reveal itself.
And maybe this is where that simple phrase, trust yourself, has some meaning.
Trust what you know today.
Trust what you feel today.
Trust the clarity that is here now.
Then allow tomorrow to arrive as tomorrow.
Because by the time it does, you may have changed again.
So may they.
So may the entire circumstance.
We do this far beyond relationships. We do it with people we hear about, with stories passed from one person to another, and with what we see happening in the world. We take what has been and assume we already know what comes next.
Yet life keeps moving underneath all of it.
Maybe the invitation is simply to stay closer to where we actually are.
Here.
Where something is already changing.
With love and blessings,
Susan
Author, Seer, Guide