How do you deal with uncertainty?
Whenever the word “future” comes up, we all start wondering what our future will look like. Will we be able to achieve what we have imagined for ourselves or not? This is where a fear begins—the fear of uncertainty. The fact that we do not know what lies ahead can create so much fear in our lives that we sometimes become victims of overthinking without even realizing it.
To be honest, until some time ago, I had only heard the word “overthinking.” I would always wonder what it actually meant. But when I learned about it and read more about it, I realized that, somewhere along the way, I had also become a victim of overthinking.
Constantly thinking about whether what I am doing or studying will help me clear my exam, or whether it will benefit me in the future or tomorrow—these thoughts would keep coming to my mind. To be honest, I still sometimes worry about my future, because this is something that happens in everyone’s mind. People want to know what tomorrow will bring, how their life will turn out, whether it will be the way they imagined it or whether something completely different will happen.
I, too, spent a long time thinking about my future in the same way. I was preparing for a government exam, or you could say I still am. I had thought that once I got a job, I would finally pursue my hobbies, travel, read books, and write. But I spent so much time overthinking and worrying about the future that I began looking at my present only as something I had to get through while waiting for that future.
But so far, I have neither got the job nor been able to do all those things in the way I had imagined. Then, because of some personal reasons, I had to stop studying for some time and even change my career path.
From all these experiences, I have learned that worrying so much about tomorrow is not always right. Life can change at any moment. The future we imagine does not necessarily arrive exactly the way we planned it.
Perhaps being so uncertain about our future is, in some way, an injustice to our present. We become so lost in tomorrow that we stop thinking about today. We forget to look at today—to see what we did today, or how we actually lived it.
People start running away from this fear because they do not know what tomorrow will bring, or even what the very next moment might bring. We exhaust ourselves by thinking too much about tomorrow.
But running away from these fears, or simply trying to stop thinking about tomorrow, is not the answer either. We need to pause for a moment and understand where this fear comes from. We need to stop at our present, look at it, and live it.
Because if we want to live or do something in the future, perhaps we should start doing it today. We should start living it today. Then maybe our future will also become what we want it to be.
Because this is what I have learned from my overthinking and my fear of the future: instead of constantly worrying about tomorrow, we should start living our today. Only then can our tomorrow become the one we want.
Even now, I do not know whether my future will be exactly the way I once imagined it. But perhaps I no longer need to know the complete answer. I want to do what I can today, today itself.
Because, after all, our future is not created on one particular day. It is created through all those small days that we are living today.