What do i do today and tomorrow? Or the power of finding your voice

What do i do today and tomorrow? Or the power of finding your voice

The past and the present may be different from the future if we change our path, and tread the road we want to walk on. Actions until now are already history. What are you doing tomorrow?

There is a very wise and deep saying by someone we have not been able to find on the internet:

People spend 80 years of their life only influenced by the first 18

If you look around you and within yourself, you will realise that this is unfortunately correct. Most of us relish our childhood as the best years of our lives.

The reason for this is primarily scientific as the brain is growing at this time and we are mostly dealing with new experiences. Everything feels fresh and new and this is what we remember. In addition reasons such as the brain choosing to remember only the happy events and forgetting the unhappy or mundane ones, make the past a treasure chest of good memories.

More often than not, the path we choose during these youthful years is what we travel on. New experiences that shed more light on what we like and what we don’t are often ignored. These new understandings also tell us more about who we are and who we are not, giving us a sense of our identity. Unfortunately, the tried and tested path we walk on is what we choose to follow.

If we are unhappy with the work we do or the lives we live, the result is a lifetime of apathy and at best jadedness. The unhappiness becomes all-pervading. We choose to drown our feelings in drinks, thrills or other totems that do not offer the solace we need since they do not solve the underlying problem.

An image shared by the website Wait But Why makes a very good case for the options you have in front of you at any point in time including this very moment.

Many of us may have read Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’. The poem in Frost’s own voice is shared below for your listening and reading pleasure. The poem is over a century old and extols you to do something that is only gaining some currency now as social media breaks down barriers: find your voice.

Take on this process of finding your voice, who you are and who are not, in small steps. There are enough sayings about how a drop after drop creates an ocean, a word after one word creates a book and like most clichés, these are fundamental yet commonplace truths that we ignore in search of the glamorous. It is good to remember that true glamour hides the hard work and the sweat and tears that have built that skyscraper.

And there you have it.

This – finding your voice – is the last part of our small series on living the life you want, doing the work you do or what is called work-life balance. The images we shared speak of greater truths that lie beneath the surface. The series was as follows:

Part I: Is Friday overrated? Or why it is so easy to love the weekend

Here we covered why we get it wrong and what we can do about it. The first part was on understanding that the concept of work as we understand it is a social construct and why doing what we love the smart way may be the key.

Part II: What do i do this Saturday? Or why some alone think time is what you need

The second part of the series focussed on introspection and why looking inward is critical to living the life we dream of. We wrote about a series of unconventional steps that you can do to start looking within yourselves without getting overwhelmed by it.

Part III: Why do i feel sad every Sunday evening? Or the power of writing to change your life

In the third part, we looked at how writing down your stressful or traumatic experiences at work can put you back in control. This post is also directly related to the second part as we wrote on writing and how it can change your life and how to go about it – something that is key to introspection.

Part IV: How do i work this Monday? Or 6 radical ways to have a better Monday

In the fourth part, we looked at 6 radical but sure-fire and yet underappreciated ways to have a better Monday and week ahead. The ideas were somewhat different and any one of them will help you have better Mondays and workweeks ahead.

Part V: What do i do today and tomorrow? Or the power of finding your voice

This current post.