Though I have other posts to get to putting up, today I have had two influences that lead me to want to add a follow up to the post last week about The Value of Now.
The first nudge is based on a wonderful quote by C.S. Lewis from Soul Gatherings, a blog I follow and love to read daily like a fortune cookie, by Theresa:
You can’t go back and change the beginning,
but you can start where you are and change the ending.
~ C.S. Lewis ~
Obviously C. S. Lewis was advocating for a practice of Better Endings.
Then today I happened upon a movie about the implications of parallel realities: Yesterday. This is a fun story about a fairly unsuccessful but well-motivated musician in England named Jack Malik who, after a bus accident caused by a global blackout, wakes up to find he is living in a reality where, among some other odd glitches, nobody has ever heard of The Beatles! So, Mark reintroduces Beatles songs as if he were the original songwriter/ singer, and he attains great success and fame for his apparent genius.
I will not spoil the ending to Yesterday for you; this is a film well worth seeing. But it led me to think about how, since Time as we think we know it is an illusion according to modern physicists as well as many spiritual philosophies, then past and present Moments can rightly be considered parallel realities.
If we consider the future, such as Tomorrow, to be a parallel reality to Now, then what are some implications for, again, the value of Today?
A better endings visualization: Imagine that tomorrow is a parallel reality to today. Many aspects remain stable across these parallel worlds: you are still where and how you are living though a day older, most routines are intact, etcetera. But creatively envision adding one TWEAK to your parallel reality of tomorrow. What element(s) might you change as you shift upon waking tomorrow morning into a slightly more ideal or satisfactory reality sphere? To be effective with this technique, you might consider only tweaking tomorrow slightly, to a reality it is quite feasible and possible for you to realize without too shocking of a reality shift.
You can extend this thought experiment to a future a bit further out to add some more meaningful or life-changing, reality bending tweaks. Six months from today what might your future look like from an ideal standpoint? Write it down, describe yourself living in a parallel reality six months from now that contains the sorts of changes you wish were possible. Then consider, what steps can you take now, and in the near foreseeable future, to bring this new reality about?
Since the future IS a parallel reality to the present Moment, we CAN tweak those elements we would like to change, then carry forth in that direction.
Better Endings to All!
Better Endings 