What Are You Looking Forward To?

By Heidi Shimberg


What are you looking forward to? What is the occasion, intention, person, or experience that occupies that little place in your head that when you think about it, the nook of your mouth hints of a small smile? The gleam in your eye takes your imagination to that specific factor in some future time or place and converts the present into an acceptable condition, however the comfort or the situation.

From our earliest moments, we certainly have looked forward to birthdays, trips to Disney World, favorite foods, best friends, first days of the summer season, shopping trips with a parent, fishing with a favorite uncle, or baking pies with an aunt. Our planet was shaped by these forward feelings, and our boring normalcy was more palatable with ideas of what was around the corner. Just how ironic that the simplicity of childhood had any sort of necessity for such thinking. But so it went, and there it was.

As life develops longer in the tooth, do we continue to explore such longings? Do we remember what we look ahead to next? Do we understand that the habits we established as children are simply as important today as we live our lives stuffed with a greater sense of complexity and confusion, sometimes losing focus on just what we should really be focusing upon?

Think about what you look forward to today? It could be something in your life, or the life of a loved one. Your grandson's wedding ceremony in December, your daughter's graduation ceremony from medical school, your completion of next month's 5K run, your successful completion of physical therapy from rotator cuff surgery.

Focus on giving that an energy that can motivate your behavior towards your next milestone. Your next year.Your next month.Or your next day. At every age, we should always be looking forward to something - it makes living in the present much more interesting, because like reading a book, you have the next page to turn to.

Life should always manifest that little smile at the nook of your face when you reflect upon what you may look forward to. You owe it to yourself to maintain that childhood tradition alive and well while traveling along life's every-changing journey.




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