Day 2 - Embracing the Unknown

Today I am embracing the unknown. It’s going to be nearly 100 degrees by early afternoon, and I don’t want to go outside so I am sitting at my dining room table contemplating how I can embrace the unknown from inside the comfort of my house. Seeking ways to embrace the unknown surrounded by comfort kind of negates the point of the challenge, doesn’t it?

Time to brainstorm.

I’ve been watching Marvel’s Daredevil recently. It’s interesting to watch the main character, an individual who is visually impaired but has developed, or rather, fine-tuned his senses to such precision that it’s almost like he has special abilities. Sight is a privilege that I take for granted. Perhaps, I could try to do some of my household tasks blindfolded today, attempt to test how well I could get along alone in my home without my sight.

If I stop for a moment and think about myself and my place in this world, I recognize that I know relatively little. Not because I am unskilled or because I am uneducated, but because the world is vast and constantly changing. The decisions we make today have consequences far into the future that we can never expect to fully understand.

I learned a phrase several years ago: One Day at a Time.

This phrase helped me to reframe my perception of expectations I set for myself and others. While I do love to be exposed to new experiences and opportunities to continually learn, I also had the habit of writing out all the arrangements I’d made in a planner months before they would come to fruition.

If you’d have asked me in January what my plans were in September, I could have told you of half a dozen things I’d already scheduled. I lived this way my entire life until I learned those five words. After I began living life one day at a time, I better appreciated the present. Sitting here, contemplating today’s goal of embracing the unknown, I realize that I have misplaced my priorities and the concept of experiencing each day as unique to this lifetime has vanished.

While attempting to keep busy these past 5 months, I’ve gotten back into the habit of filling up days and weeks of my planner ahead of time. I am recommitting today to embrace the unknown. I will start by looking no further than the current week of my day planner, permitting my hand to flip only one page into the future.

There will be appointments and meetings that must be scheduled in advance, but I will avoid pretending that I can prevent fearing the unknown by attempting to control the future through filling up blocks on a desk calendar with plans and plans and more plans.

Stock image provided by Unsplash.