CHAPTER 8

LET GO OF THE FUTURE

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

—LAO TZU

When my parents died, a piece of my future died too. While they hadn’t pressured me to follow a particular career, they did have high hopes and dreams for me. Were those hopes and dreams still alive without them? Were they the right hopes and dreams for me, and how should I know?

Once the initial shock wore off, I began having frequent nightmares and panic attacks. My nocturnal psyche would convince itself that my parents were alive and well, and recent experiences were but a bad dream. Then I would awake and relive my sister’s phone call all over again. Panic, anxiety, disbelief. Wash, rinse, repeat.

After a while, I began not dreaming at all. This relieved the edge of pain, but what is a future without dreams?

Fast-forward many years to today, when a future without dreams feels uncomfortably close for too many people.

Perhaps you had a job you loved, and then you lost it. But you didn’t just lose a job: you lost a piece of your identity, your extended family of colleagues, and a key reason you woke up motivated every day.

Or maybe it’s your child who dreams of going to college, and now neither of you is sure it’s worth the expense and unknowns—or if it’s even possible.

Or you worked hard for years on a project that was just about to launch. It was to catapult your career. But the launch went sideways or, worse, had to be scrapped.

Or this situation describes not you but a member of your team or community.

Or perhaps it wasn’t a project but a lifestyle. You’d been experimenting for years to juggle work and family in order to “have it all.” You’d finally found something resembling balance and it was sustainable … until change hit.

Perhaps your careful financial planning finally paid off: you’d quit your job and had tickets to travel the world, but then your itinerary became untenable.

Or perhaps little by little, living month-to-month sapped your energy to dream.

Each of these scenarios comes down to one fundamental question: When the world you’ve come to know suddenly melts, or flips upside down in ways you neither expected nor desire, how do you keep your dreams alive?

THE SUPERPOWER: LET GO OF THE FUTURE

Letting go of the future enables a better future to emerge.

From a young age, many people are led to believe that humans can predict and control the future. The messaging goes: Work hard and you’ll get a good job. Jump through the right hoops and the right doors will open. Make plans that will go as expected. These instructions aren’t bad, but each one assumes a predictable, controllable world … which couldn’t be further from reality today.

This old messaging is an illusion. Certainty is an illusion. The fact is, no one knows what tomorrow holds and no one can control the future. The old script describes how things are “supposed” to play out in a static, fixed, unchanging world. But that world is long gone and is not coming back.

Today’s world in flux demands a new script that understands: the ability to let go of your perception of control is where real control is to be found.

Letting go of the illusion that you can control external circumstances releases you to focus on what you can control: how you respond. Letting go of everything you don’t need frees up time, space, and resources for what you do.

To be clear, letting go doesn’t mean giving up or somehow failing (though adherents to the old script struggle greatly to understand this). The ability to let go is in many ways the ultimate Flux Superpower. It may be counterintuitive, yet therein lies its potency.

Letting go gives you control of what really matters, empowers you to move forward, and reminds you to live fully right now. With a Flux Mindset, you turn fear and frustration about tomorrow into fuel for your purpose, potential, and inner peace today.

STUCK IN THE PAST, FEARING THE FUTURE

Human beings are incredibly good at living in the past and the future. As neuroscientist Amishi Jha says, “The mind is great at time travel.”¹⁴³ In fact, we spend the majority of our time in this mode. We reminisce about the past (waxing nostalgic, regretting a decision, or simply remembering what was) and seek to forecast the future of our dreams while avoiding our fears.

Reminiscing about the past and forecasting the future—especially when it “must” work out or unfold a particular way—can deter you from living today. Time spent reliving yesterday or trying to predict tomorrow is time spent missing life itself. You are fully alive only in the present. Right here, right now.

Of course, I don’t mean that reflection and planning don’t matter. Remembering happy times can lift our spirits, and preparing for what’s next is both responsible and often essential. Memory and anticipation are among the greatest joys of life.

What I do mean is that all too often we get stuck in the past and future and can’t get ourselves back to now. We end up spending our lives somewhere else. We forget our incredible capacity to engage the unknown and instead creep towards a future driven more by fear of it than the possibility of something better. Our minds default to a negativity bias: we tend to have more negative thoughts than positive ones, which stay in our memory longer and affect our decision-making more. When this cycle plays out over time, the results can be disastrous. We need stronger mental muscles to both ground ourselves in the present, so that we can appreciate and learn from life right now, and lean into the future with a level head.

A world in flux is your time, our time, the time to do just this.

AFRAID TO LET GO

One of the most interesting and unexpected insights on my journey through flux is that when we talk about letting go, we always talk about letting go of the past: an old grudge, a regret, a love story, or a moment that is now gone. Occasionally, we’ll talk about letting go of something in the present: perhaps a source of stress, a toxic relationship, or a bad habit. But we never—really think about it, never (!)—talk about letting go of the future.

Of course, some people are excited about the future. But even they know that the future has countless unknowns and nothing is guaranteed. Many people, however, fear the future—and in so doing, they get stuck … paralyzed … fixated on a situation they can’t control. The more you grasp for what is beyond your reach, or what is no longer working, the more frustrated you become.

And yet, this is exactly when you should be letting go. But no one talks about it, no one teaches it, and certainly no one celebrates it. Why not?

CONTROL: PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

If you’ve spent your life following the old script, the chances are very good that you’re geared to fight for control, chase success, and yearn for external recognition. If this is all you’ve been taught, it’s hard to fathom any other way of being. Yet this is far from the full truth; there is more than one way to be, to think, and to succeed.

Some people are also blinded by privilege. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, privilege limits our perceptions of what’s in the script. In some ways privilege gives you more choice, while in other ways it limits your choices. Specifically, the more privilege you perceive yourself to have (or the more choices you technically have), the more fearful if not petrified you are of making the wrong choice, and the harder it is to let go.

And yet, here is the great paradox: only those who are able to let go are those with real power and freedom. Those who can see through privilege are powerful in a way that those with privilege will never understand, unless they let go.

Of course, there is a huge difference between being forced to let go and choosing to let go. When change hits and you’re forced to let go, that’s usually when resistance and fear show up. But when you choose to let go proactively, it can be a profoundly liberating and empowering experience.

Letting go offers another fantastic opportunity to learn from other cultures with humility and respect. Humans have struggled with issues of attachment and control since time immemorial. What can we teach one another in the hopes of improving every-one’s ability to let go?

Aparigraha is a Sanskrit term that translates into nonattachment, nongrasping, and nonpossessiveness. In the cultures in which it prevails, including Hinduism and Jainism, aparigraha is the highest form of human strength. It’s a superpower—with or without flux.

Aparigraha is the ability to let go of everything that does not help you be your best self. It includes the ability to let go of expectations and fears about the future. Fear shatters your ability to be present, and when left unchecked, it leads only to more fear. Anger and anxiety are manifestations of this fear. It’s a never-ending cycle of self-sabotage and a double hijacking: it both saps your mental energy towards fear and prevents you from spending that time in productive ways. This is called “ironic mental processing”: when we try to avoid thinking about something, our brain tries to help us not think about it by constantly checking in with us to see if we’re thinking about it. Not only does this not work; it’s actually counterproductive.¹⁴⁴

Personally, I experienced both fear and ironic mental processing for so long that I thought I would go crazy. Even before my parents died, I had an affinity for worry. My mom struggled with depression for much of her adult life, and there was a constant sense of walking on eggshells at home; my earliest memories include it. When she and my dad died, my propensity for self-sabotage grew. It was only once I began to explore the ideas in this chapter that I began to see a kinder, wiser way to live—and so much to let go.

Today I envision living in a society in which the role model of success is the person who can let go: of fear, anxiety, and expectations about the future. It’s not only that you can do this; it’s that you choose to do this. You do this because you know that letting go makes you free: free from living a life based on someone else’s view of the world, free from the illusion that you can control what happens next, and free from becoming unhinged when change hits. In this freedom, what seemed impossible before is now within reach.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

—LAO TZU

THE NEW SCRIPT: 3 SHIFTS TO FLUX

Letting go of the future doesn’t mean dropping it like a hot potato. Rather, it means reframing your relationship to the future and whatever change may come. There are three main ways this new script can be written:

1. A mindset shift: from predict to prepare. This shift recognizes that it’s impossible to predict the future, nor is any one future guaranteed to play out. Rather, a whole bunch of different futures are possible, and your best approach is to be as prepared as possible for the prospects coming your way. Resist the urge to predict what “will” happen and invest your energy in crafting initial responses to what “could” happen instead.

Immediately after my parents died (and long before I’d connected any of these dots), I would sit and write down all of the different ways that my future might unfold. Maybe I’d teach or maybe I’d start my own business. Maybe I’d get married and maybe not. Maybe I’d have kids and maybe not. Maybe I’d live in Timbuktu or Thailand, or maybe I’d stay close to home. Then I would look at these scenarios, and I would ask, “Could I find peace and joy again?”

In each of these wildly different scenarios, I concluded that I could. Each was full of change and uncertainty and massive unknowns, yet each offered a path forward. When I could let go of trying to predict what would happen, this allowed a whole bunch of different-yet-fulfilling futures to emerge.

2. An expectations shift: from “things will go to plan” to “plans will change.” Even if you can let go of your desire to predict, your brain may still default to the assumption that your plans will work out (and if they don’t, then you’ve failed). This mismanagement of one’s own expectations is the root of much suffering and second-guessing.

Think about a recent experience in which things didn’t go as planned. How did you respond: Were you angry or anxious, or did you take it in stride? How might you have responded better, or prepared differently, if you’d known that your well-laid plans would change?

Flipping your mental switch to treat change as the general rule, rather than the exception, improves everything: your ability to pivot, your foresight, and your compassion towards others as we all navigate today’s landscape of uncertainty.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

3. A shift in focus: from known to unknown. All too often, when solving problems or navigating change, people look to be better prepared should the same thing happen again. This isn’t a bad strategy per se, but it’s incomplete. What about things that haven’t happened yet?

The future is only a concept; we can never truly know what it will be. True, history is an amazing teacher, yet today’s changes include factors that are new to the human experience. For the most part, surprise and unknowability don’t show up in today’s models. Yet we know that what got us here isn’t necessarily going to be what will ensure you, or I, or anyone thrives in the future.

When you shift to being in awe of life’s mysteries, rather than expecting the past to repeat itself, your horizon literally and figuratively expands.

REAWAKEN YOUR AGENCY

Letting go of the illusion that any one person can control the future frees every person to focus on what they can control: how they respond to change. In other words, letting go of the future demands that you reawaken your sense of agency: that feeling of being in charge of your life. Empowering agency is a core pillar of your new script.

Agency often includes a much longer list of things than you might at first write out. It includes your ability to learn, create, decide, and grow. It includes everything from your ability to vote (or not), to responsibly manage your screen time (or not), to apply the “law of two feet”—which says that in any situation in which you’re neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet to find a place where your participation is more meaningful—and leave an unfulfilling job or end an unfulfilling relationship (or not), to whether you respond with kindness or with animosity. Agency is also closely related to seeing what’s invisible: when you learn to see what’s invisible, you discover even more ways to apply your agency.

Expressing your agency doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get your way, but it does give you a voice. You can’t control the outcomes, but you can control whether and how you contribute to them.

Agency has never been more important—and yet, collectively, we’ve done an extraordinarily good job of stamping it out across society. Education systems teach students to “study for the test” rather than embark on a quest for true learning; consumer mass-marketing machines persuade us that our only real job is to buy, not to think; technologies numb us to our feelings as we scroll and swipe. Each of these examples reveals how agency, subtly and even unconsciously, can shift to the recesses of human consciousness.

But agency is still there: your agency, my agency, and our agency together. Agency has never left, and so long as you are alive, you cannot lose it. Now more than ever, it’s time to reclaim it, own it, and use it fully.

THE “PROBLEM” WITH CHANGE

Problems are basically unwelcome change. Something happened that you wish had not, or something didn’t happen that you wish had. This something may have happened five minutes ago or five decades ago. The “problem” is some kind of change that you wish would disappear.

Today more than ever, it seems, humans are in perpetual problem-solving mode. Long-standing problems, brand-new problems, complex problems, problems society thrusts on us, and problems we create, whether by aiming for the wrong goals, provoking others, or failing to see our blind spots. The elusive search for happiness seems woefully and mistakenly dependent on having resolved problems. (Yet as we learned in the last chapter, this misses the mark too.)

Oftentimes, you may find yourself faced with problems you simply can’t solve on your own. Things you would love to fix and that perhaps someday will be resolved. But in the here and now, they’re intractable and beyond your control.

Think about a specific problem you’re grappling with at the moment. Perhaps it’s new work dynamics or new family dynamics. A new supply-chain partner or a new schedule. Declining revenues or declining confidence. Or a relationship that’s been faltering for years.

In such situations, society often teaches you to fight, and that if you don’t fight, you fail.

And yet, this is not the complete story. Of course, there are times when fighting is the right thing to do: human rights, a livable planet, social justice, and fundamental fairness are good examples of this “good trouble.” But there is a different, very large and distracting set of problems we often bludgeon by fighting, which would benefit more from a different stance: acceptance.

For now.

Acceptance does not mean failure or being passive. (Again, the old script struggles to see this. But that myopia is exactly what makes that narrative outdated.) Acceptance means being present, with a twist: rather than spending your strength feeling anxious about the change itself, use that strength to lean into the change in your response.

When you’re able to accept change by letting go of the illusion that you can control it, remarkable things can happen. You find peace, clarity, and even previously unfathomable aha’s. Your imagination lights on fire.

When you allow yourself to let go of what you were trying to control, a whole new universe of possibility opens up. When you stop preoccupying your mind with what’s not working, you create space to manifest what could be. To invent something new, or to make any kind of change—in your daily life, in an organization, or in society—requires first the ability to imagine that things could be different. It invites your intention to see differently, rather than a resolution that a particular outcome “must” happen.

Think back to the ways in which your life has changed recently. What have you accepted? What are you still resisting? What have you let go of, and what did that create space for?

WORRY LESS ABOUT WORRYING

For most of my life, I was enveloped in a fog of worry. My earliest memories are of my mother worrying that I would die of severe food allergies. (Her fear wasn’t entirely misplaced: my allergies kept me frequently ill and my pediatrician busy.) By the age of five, I’d learned to worry about money, because it was perpetually in short supply. By elementary school, I chronically worried that other kids didn’t like me. After school, I worried about whether and when to go home, in the hopes of avoiding an increasingly inevitable family argument.

Then my parents died, and my worry went into overdrive. Generalized anxiety became nightmares and panic attacks. Sometimes I would feel completely unmoored by grief, cracked open in a way I wanted desperately to understand. Clearly, my parents’ accident wasn’t just a bad dream. This was my new reality. But now what? My rational and irrational brains constantly dueled over what was “worth” worrying about. The answer was usually: everything.

It wasn’t until my forties that I learned that a perpetual, chronic state of worry isn’t normal. It happened unexpectedly, when I was asked to describe my earliest memory of not feeling worried … and I couldn’t recall a single one. True, I could travel and speak and stretch beyond my comfort zone, but these things were easy compared with quieting the bird of anxiety that chirped incessantly on my shoulder about anything, everything, or nothing at all. Indeed, on the very best days I would worry about the fact that there was nothing to worry about.

The day I realized that I had zero sense of what it felt like to be worry-free was a wake-up call. Back then, I knew enough to know that worry and anxiety feed on themselves, becoming a vicious and never-ending cycle. But I hadn’t realized how deep this wound had cut personally, and I didn’t know how to heal it.

Overcoming chronic anxiety is in many ways a lifelong endeavor. It’s a gradual rewiring of the brain. It’s also one thing to say “Worry less about the worry” and another to actually do so.

One of the most useful practices I’ve come across for this is to ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?,” and then flip the rhetoric on its head. Let me explain.

When it comes to change, humans can be prone to catastrophize. I can hear you now: the “worst that could happen” is actually pretty bad. The answer is a series of negatives: What you would lose, what would not be there, or what would be empty? It’s implicit in how the question is framed: the worst.

I get it. Change is damn scary. It clouds your horizons and paralyzes your courage. But it only tyrannizes you if you let it.

What if you flipped the question and asked instead, “What’s the best thing that could happen if I shifted from resisting change to yielding to it? What’s the best thing that could happen if I let go of my expectations about the future?”

Might you discover that you’re more capable than you ever dreamed possible? Might you finally see doors that have been waiting to be opened?

Might the worst that could happen be never knowing what could have been?

When my parents died, “the worst that could happen” didn’t seem nearly as bad as what had already happened. It took time for “the best that could happen” perspective to sink in, though as soon as it did, it felt like the earth shifted beneath my feet. My ground became solid yet gentle. I could keep my parents’ memory alive and feel genuinely excited about the future.

Little by little, I developed habits to deal with my anxiety. My fear of the future continued to get the upper hand from time to time, but I learned to pay attention to what the fear was saying. I started using this simple yet powerful three-part process that I continue to use today:

This approach isn’t about trivializing the hard stuff or forgetting about loss. Suffering and challenges are part of your story, my story, humanity’s story. The key is to not let fear of the future hijack your life script or prevent you from living today.

Ultimately, your mindset determines your well-being. A Flux Mindset knows how to let go of the worry and lean into the wonder of what could be.

BEGIN AGAIN

The human brain is hardwired to plan for the future, yet let’s be honest: no one knows how the future will unfold. I say this as a renowned futurist! The more we try to predict and control, or boast about knowing “for sure,” the more the future slips through our fingers.

Then again, life has always been this way. No one can ever know exactly what any day holds, much less a week, a year, a decade, or an entire generation. But therein is the real beauty and even awe: when every day is new and unknowable, every day is also an opportunity to begin again.

Every. Single. Day. To. Begin. Anew.

This reality isn’t unique to today: a world in flux and a faster pace of change simply make it clearer.

And when every day is full of change, and every day also offers a new opportunity to begin again, the way to reconcile this tension—between your desire to plan and an unknowable future—is to take things one day at a time. As Dr. Judson Brewer, director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, advises, “Do what needs to get done today, and then take care of tomorrow, when it comes: tomorrow. When it comes to information, the closer to now you stay, the more clearly you will be able to think.”¹⁴⁵

If today feels like too long a horizon, consider this hour, this minute, this second. The key is to stay grounded in the present moment and recognize every opportunity to begin again.

After my parents died, I was stuck in what felt like interminable not-knowing. I so badly wanted to plan, yet I couldn’t possibly know what was going to happen. Waking me up every morning was the same question: What in the world should I do?

Gradually I learned to boil this down to the here and now. Each morning, I had two choices: I could get out of bed and see what happens, or I could curl up in a ball and never know. Many days, crawling into a corner and disappearing sounded really good. But a little voice would chirp: Don’t you want to know what today holds?

Over time, the simple act of getting up and putting one foot in front of the other became less of a deliberation and more of a small daily victory. My mantra became: “I want to know, but I have to learn.” I wrapped my head around the reality that there are some things we simply cannot know. It felt unfair, even cruel, yet I realized I could destroy myself if I kept trying to pin down what was beyond my—or anyone’s—grasp.

And this led to the most helpful realization of all: there is beauty in not knowing. Not knowing encourages curiosity, wonder, and awe, all of which are in short supply today. When it’s impossible to know, then it is time to let go … and begin again.

HOLD THE FUTURE GENTLY

When change hits, the ability to let go—of expectations, of what to do in this uncertain future, and even of the need to know—makes all the difference. People who grasp on to “what was” or believe they can control what happens next are easily derailed. But those who can let go of what-was-yet-is-no-longer, and give the future the space and oxygen it needs to emerge, will thrive.

Letting go of the future is about flow, not grasping. Working with life rather than against it. Fluxing rather than feeling stuck. Seeing the future not as a sinkhole of uncertainty or an impenetrable brick wall but more akin to water: pliable, yielding, taking the shape of its container, impossible for human hands to hold for long. A form that is at once gentle and supple, yet can carve through prehistoric rock.

As water holds the shape of its container, powerful yet at ease with its temporary state of being, holding the future gently is how you embrace—and thrive—in flux.

All that you touch you Change. All that you Change changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.

—OCTAVIA BUTLER

LET GO OF THE FUTURE: REFLECTIONS