Future You
Picture this:
You wake up, and your clothes are laid out and ready for you to step into once you’ve washed your face and prepped yourself for the day. Upon dressing, you step into a clean and welcome kitchen, and someone has set up the coffee pot for you and put out your favorite mug, so all you have to do is press the button and it’s off and brewing. You want to get a load of laundry started, but in the early morning, lugging your laundry from the upstairs to the main floor is not a chore you look forward to. But oh! Someone else has put all of the laundry into the machine for you, and you just have to start it!
Opening the fridge to get the creamer for your coffee, you see a lunch prepared for you (and kids, too!). The protein for tonight’s dinner has been pulled and is in the fridge, thawing, so it will be ready for tonight’s dinner. Your water bottle is full and ready to grab on your way out the door.
How would this morning make you feel? Loved? Cared for? Valuable? Prepared to handle the messes that will come up throughout the day that need your response? That’s how it makes me feel when I wake up to this scenario. I try to wake up to it as often as I can. But who does this for me? I do.
If there was a single piece of advice that I could offer someone struggling to find peace and calm moments in their life, it would be this: Do something nice for Future You.
Learning to take the time to anticipate the needs (and obstacles!) you will have and prepare or plan for them is a huge step towards living in a proactive state vs. a reactive state. Living in a reactive state leaves us unable to establish any control over the pace or direction of our days. We’re living moment to moment and just bracing ourselves for who or what will need us next. There’s no time for carving out rejuvenation or pausing to get a breath. By setting up Future You with the tools she needs to take care of herself, you are injecting some proactivity into your day to allow you to be calmer and more intentional in your reactions to the unexpected. (Or even the expected!)
There is lots of information out there about the importance of routines, how to set up routines, the benefits of routines, etc. But if there’s ONE routine that you should start with, it is your evening routine. Take a few minutes each night and prep your morning. Set up that coffee pot, load the last of the dishes into the dishwasher, and run it. Choose your clothes for the morning. Turn down your bed and create a zen space to get good quality sleep. Treat Future You like you’d treat someone you love. Because you are worthy of love and feeling taken care of. You deserve peace.
Once you’ve started adopting some routines in the evenings that help prepare your mornings, you can start to think beyond that. What will you need this week? Do you have a way that you track your schedule? Maybe it’s your phone, or a paper planner. What events are coming up? Do you have to send in snacks on Thursday for a pre-school holiday party? If you are looking ahead and see that, you can add them into your grocery shopping and don’t have to make a special trip. Do you have family portraits scheduled, and you haven’t planned or procured the outfits needed for them? Take a few moments to do that now, so that you’re not stressed at the last minute and only able to pick from the available choices at your local Target.
Look, I know a lot of us waited until the last minute to write papers in college, burning the midnight fuel to get it done the night before it was due. I had some 4 a.m. days typing feverously for a 7 a.m. class, too. But that’s not how we want to be. In fact, most of the time we spend the entire time berating ourselves for not “having it together” or being so good at “crastinating” that we went PRO. (Get it? Procrastinating? Haha! … I’m sorry.)
In this state, our needs are not met, we’re not thriving… We’re just surviving. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can’t achieve greatness when we’re stuck in survival mode. So, let’s thrive. What things can you do today for Future You?
