You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
From Alan Watts
Hi! New Year’s resolution? How about new moment’s resolution? Today’s sticky is:
You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago. - Alan Watts
Why might you want to be something different than you were five minutes ago? For me, I want to live life intentionally — to respond not react. It’s 100% ok if I reacted a few minutes ago. That was who I was in that moment, and now I can choose differently.
I mean, who am I, who are you, anyway? It’s not so easy to define, nor is it necessary. Since all we truly have is the present moment, then whatever you were last year or yesterday or even five minutes ago does not define who you are right now. That’s hard to grasp because humans love to label. We want to understand, and if things are constantly changing then we’ll never fully understand. We can’t keep up. Maybe an alternative is to let go of the need to fully understand?
Watts says “no obligation”, implying that you might feel you have an obligation. To who? Yourself? Other people? Humans go about life expecting that people and things will act or be as we expect based on how things went in the past. Past behavior is the greatest indication of future behavior, right? That’s a story, not a fact, and it’s limiting.
An alternative is to not have expectations. To accept whatever happens as what is real in that moment, regardless of if I expected it or not. Is that easy? Hell no! I understand it logically more than I embody it. But that’s ok. I can try again in five minutes.
What do you think?
Love,
Kate
p.s. Like this? Check out this short piece about being a verb. (Useful / Beautiful is my other Substack with slightly longer form writing.)
