Too soon to tell...
/Many of us have thoughts that are hours, days, months, and years ahead of where we are right now. We worry about the future and create as many what-if scenarios as we can imagine.
It has been said that anxiety is an obsession with the future and depression is an obsession with the past. Those aren’t completely true statements, but it does feel like there may be some kernels of truth there.
Anxious thinking occurs when our brain sounds the alarms of threats ahead and then begins to make a plan for how we will avoid danger. We all fear heartbreak, setbacks, disappointments, failures, and unknowns so our brains work over-time to develop plans to avoid those painful feelings.
Our minds love to race ahead and try to figure out solutions way ahead of time.
This can be helpful, it can also be harmful. For some of us, it is hard to turn off the worry. Our imaginations keep developing scenarios of things that might happen. We have lived experience to know that most of the horrible things we imagine never occur, but we still can’t stop ourselves from worrying.
The simple phrase “too soon to tell” can help us interrupt our worries about the future and anchor us into the present moment.
This phrase gives us permission to not have the answers right now.
Here are some worries that clients have shared recently that might benefit from a gentle whisper of “too soon to tell”:
Will I like living in this new city?
Will we be able to have a baby?
Will my child be successful when he starts high school this fall?
Will I get the job I’m interviewing for?
Will my kids make friends in our new neighborhood?
We are going to different colleges, can we make long-distance dating work?
Is this the right career path for me?
What will the biopsy results be?
Can this business idea make money?
We can spin and spin on these questions while imagining a thousand scenarios of outcomes, but these are all unknowns without a definitive answer today. For every worry listed here, it is truly too soon to tell. We need more time, data, information, and experience before we will know the answers to these questions.
I’ve been playing with this practice a lot lately in my own life. I’m in a chapter of many life transitions happening at the same time. It’s been freeing to say to myself, “Ginger, it’s too soon to tell how that will turn out, just allow it to unfold.” As I began experimenting with it, I thought it might feel dismissive, but it actually grounds me in the reminder that I can’t predict the future. My desire to know how things will go is coming from my longing to feel in control and find assurance that it is all going to be okay. However, I cause my own self-torture by imagining negative possibilities. Telling myself “too soon to tell” gives me permission to stop imagining things.
I remember when my husband, Rob, and I first started dating 28 years ago and we lived in different cities in different states, I asked him “how could this relationship ever work?” He said with sincere honesty, “it’s too soon to tell” and I was offended thinking he wasn’t all-in with this relationship like I was. I had an unreasonable expectation that he could tell me exactly how this was going to work, I can laugh at that now. (This story actually became a joke between us anytime I wanted to tease him about being non-committal.) But what I know today, is that he was right. It was too soon to tell. We had to give it time and do our best to keep it going, but neither of us could know for sure how it would develop. Over the two years of long-distance dating, things aligned in our favor that I couldn’t have imagined and we put a lot of effort into staying together. When I was imagining scenarios of our future, it was hard to trust that it would in fact keep getting better. I might have wasted a lot of time imagining worst-case scenarios and likely sabotaged us without Rob’s honest wisdom of “too soon to tell.”
Next time you feel worried about the future, place your hand on your heart, and lovingly say to yourself, “too soon to tell.”
Give yourself permission to not know. Give yourself permission to wait and see. Gift yourself with releasing the pressure to figure it all out.
See what you notice and how you feel when you release the need to control the future.
There is peace to be found in the not knowing.
Allowing life to unfold alongside you,
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