It's TEDx Tuesday, and today I have a question for you:
How would you live differently today if you knew there was going to be a happy ending?
Think about whatever you're worrying about right now. Or what you're building, dreaming of, stressed out about.
Your health. Your relationship. Your kids. Money. Work. Someone you love. Something you're waiting to hear. Something you desperately want to work out.
Now imagine someone from the future came back to tell you:
Psssst... everything is going to work out. Everything.
They don't tell you how.
They don't tell you when.
They don't even tell you what "working out" is going to look like.
They just tell you that somehow, this story you're living has a happy ending.
Would you experience today differently?
Would you stop worrying? Would you loosen your grip a little? Would you feel better about yourself? Would you sleep better tonight? Would you stop trying so hard to control everything?
I would.
Believing your dreams and goals are coming true, even without knowing how, can have a huge effect on how you live in the middle.
When I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer, I wanted someone to tell me I was going to be okay. That I was going to be cancer-free and I wasn't going to die.
Since no one could do that for me, my mind took the liberty of writing the ending itself... and it wrote the most magical one it could imagine.
I was going to be okay. Cancer-free, healed from an "incurable diagnosis," and whole. I'd come out the other side with new perky boobs, fresh healthy hair, dewy skin, and a gratitude for life that could never be broken.
Every day during treatment, believing in that happy ending changed my relationship to cancer, and my cancer cells.
It changed the way I experienced the middle.
It was hard, but I was curious. It was awful at times, and strangely, kinda cool. The amount of uncertainty was scary, and yet I lived with certainty.
Here's what I want you to contemplate:
We sometimes suffer an ending before life has even written it.
We focus on the worst-case scenario while hoping for the best, and then carry the fear of that imagined ending around as if it's already happened. We experience the grief, anger, heartbreak, and anxiety of something that isn't even here. We live in the unhappy ending while wishing for the happy one.
It's a natural way of coping, or preparing for the worst. But, what if we did the opposite?
What if we started believing in the happy ending?
Here's what I've learned. If we don't stop to check in with our minds, our thoughts, and our actions, we can spend today living inside a future we're afraid of instead of participating in the life we actually want.
Believing in a happy ending isn't about toxic positivity or living in denial. It's about recognizing that while we can't control the future, we're participating in it by how we live today.
We don't have to force the ending into being. We just have to stay available to it. Not stressed that we're doing it wrong. Not gripping so tightly that we miss what's happening now.
Just available. For the good, the way we're so ready for the bad.
Then maybe the project taking longer isn't a problem.
The unforeseen change isn't a disaster.
The break-up isn't the end of your happiness.
The mistake isn't proof you screwed everything up.
It's all part of the whole story.
Here's the secret:
Today is a happy ending.
Right now.
Being alive. Struggling. Laughing. Reading. Creating. Crying. Trying. Screwing up. Beginning again.
What if the happy ending isn't a destination, some place we'll finally arrive when everything works out... What if it's not an ending at all, but the way we live while the story is still being written?
It seems we spend too much of our lives waiting to find out if we're going to be okay before we allow ourselves to be okay.
So this week, when your mind races ahead and starts writing an ending you don't actually know, come back to this question:
How would you live today if you knew there was going to be a happy ending?
Love,
Jenn