Remember the way you felt when the summer sun touched your face? Or how soothed you became when the quiet hum of the early AM streamed through your mind? The moments before thought creeps in, before the world demands its piece of you—that’s where I want you to live more often.
Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe.
— Mark Twain
Not in the cold shadows of what-ifs but in the warmer certainty of now. Watch the way a child moves through space like it belongs to her. How she laughs without checking if anyone’s listening. She doesn’t rehearse her joy nor practice her smiles in the mirrors. She doesn’t wonder if her happiness is deserved. She exists in a state of pure presence that many people spend fortunes trying to return to
To my future self, or a future mini-me: worry is a habit we inherited from a world that taught us to measure our worth incorrectly based on our accomplishments. It’s the misuse of our imagination, which was likely instilled in us unconsciously by our parents, friends, and/or environment. But real life happens in the spaces between our accomplishments; it’s in the steam rising from your coffee cup, in the way your keys feel cold in your palm on winter mornings, in the precise sound of someone you love breathing beside you at night.
We spend so much time thinking or preparing for storms that we forget to dance under the clear sky over us. I’ve seen friends become experts at imagining catastrophes, building elaborate mental mazes of what could go wrong—raring to burst out with “I told you so!” Meanwhile, the simple miracle of existence slips through their fingers like water down the drain, unnoticed and unappreciated.
Worry is the single biggest internal factor that determines your happiness. The thief that steals tomorrow’s peace without improving today. When you’re young, you think happiness is a sequence of ticking boxes, where worthiness is a precursor to joy. But as I’ve always said, those moments that we usually consider to be peaks of ‘happiness’ are mere constellations in a vast sky of ordinary days. They give shape to your path and tell you that you are somewhere along the way—but they don’t define its worth.
Don’t give worry a bigger shadow than it gives itself. Most of your life isn’t the thrill of finally getting somewhere; it’s the serendipity of being on the way. Your happiness isn’t just the day you lose your virginity or graduate or have your wedding or the day you fucking retire; it’s in the proper normal shit you do every day.
It’s a basic Tuesday afternoon. When you’re doing a bit of work, going to the shop for bread and milk, deciding what to watch on Netflix, having a coffee in the morning, being stuck in traffic, waiting for your dinner to be ready, filling out forms, standing in queues, and doing your skincare routine. It’s not mundane. It’s just life. You’re not in between living. You are living. Along strings of very normal moments that, when strung together, create the melody of a life well-lived.
Your body is a great orchestra of bone and breath, conducted by a beating heart that doesn’t need your supervision. With lungs that don’t need reminders to inflate. With blood that doesn’t wait for permission to flow. These basic functions continue, reliable as tides, while your mind spins stories of future disasters that may never arrive.
I feel it’s safe to assume that most people reading this have the full privilege of movement, breath, and existence. It’s not a given; it’s a gift that arrives fresh each morning, sensitive to photosynthesis-like growth and possibility. Yet, people riddle their brains with worry that does nothing but ignore this privilege.
With this privilege, be more keen to ask your future self why you worry about problems that are not yet real. Why do you sit on your rocking chair and expect it to take you anywhere? Enjoy the whispers of life in those ordinary moments: the perfect crunches of toast, the warm baptism of a daily shower, the sounds of the shuffling leaves in the wind as you walk. Life is not waiting for you in some future perfect tense. It’s here in the imperfect present. In the Monday traffic jams and Tuesday shop queues. Don’t wait for a ‘big’ day to be happy, and leave behind all of those mornings, afternoons, and evenings where things are beautifully simple.
As I said, worrying is a habit – a bad habit. No one is born to worry; it is not some indelible character trait. In fact, there are entire societies that do not even know what worrying is.
— Steve Bierman
Worriers wish away the present for a future that doesn’t exist yet, trading the certainty of now for the plague of ghosts in their mind howling what-ifs. They’re so busy building fortresses that they miss the light of today.
So, future self, take this with you into 2025: complain less, breathe more. Let worry be a visitor, not a resident. When it comes, acknowledge it like an old acquaintance—familiar, but nothing intimate—then return to the business of living. Your favourite breakfast is waiting, and you know what makes it taste even better? When you’re eating it without worrying unnecessarily. And it’s easier than we like to think.
Enjoy how the process and result unfold when painting your blank canvas each day, how the empty page enjoys a full party after inviting your words in. When worry tries to convince you that everything could fall apart, remember, things could also equally fall perfectly into place.
With love and presence,
Your Past Self.