I left Hungary 37 years ago. And yet, when I hum, half of the songs are Hungarian, from before I left there.
I trust that when a song pops into my head, it is some kind of guidance. So when the song that was somehow related to the Counter-revolution in 1956, Que sera sera sung in Hungarian, when that song popped into my mind, I said to myself: pay attention. What is it saying?
I was nine years old at the time, and I was puzzled why the song would be put on the black list… I still can’t see why.
I am doing a little research on google.
The Future: What We Create Today Lets You Create the Future, says one site.
Somewhere else:
Pop lyrics are frequently rich with helpful, everyday philosophy and generally mindful perspectives (apart from ‘Rockstar’ by Nickel back, obvs). The Beatles sang ‘Let It Be’; Van Morrison reminded us that there’d be ‘Days Like This’; Doris Day pointed out that ‘Que Sera Sera’ and even Kelly Clarkson encouraged endurance and resilience in ‘Stronger’. To Each His Own belongs to and genuinely adds to that self-therapeutic canon. You should be able to listen to it as bloody good noise and feel it as a sonic salve. Its lyrics also ought to help you relocate your happy place
Now, why did this song pop up for me? And in Hungarian, nonetheless. There is a link in the Hungarian words, that is not in the original:
- the mother says: be humble like me, be content.
- And a different word in another line: shall I be rich in the English, shall I be happy in the Hungarian… big big big difference.
Hungarian people are still happier than Americans.
But let’s look at the “be humble” line… why would humility allow the future to come, or be content now?
In my “concern” article I talk about concern being like a nail that attaches your foot to the floor, limiting your options in life to dancing around the concern.
- Being concerned about the future relegates you to doing nothing about it.
- Being discontented with the present moves you to do crazy hasty “fixing” type actions, that actually make the future predictably horrible.
But what about humility… right? Where does humility come in?
I am wrecking my brain, I am looking, and finally it dawns on me.
The only thing you can really have some control about in the future is yourself.
Investing in yourself, learning skills, getting good at them, becoming all you can be.
And if you look, unless you are reasonably humble, you won’t be able to.
I first learned about humility in the training segment of a course. It said: if you want to be trained, you better declare yourself incompetent in the topic of the training.
Remember, the phases of becoming competent are
- unconsciously incompetent
- consciously incompetent
- consciously competent
- unconsciously competent
To one degree or another you are unconsciously incompetent in many things, in fact most things.
There is nothing wrong with it… you can’t know everything.
But when you fancy yourself competent when you are not, that stops being trained, getting trained, learning anything impossible.
Unless you know that you are supposed to be incompetent in order to learn, you don’t like experiencing your incompetence.
In the 20-day skill building challenge a lot of the participants took on something physical to learn, play the ukulele, learn touch typing, for example.
- When what you are learning is physical, you’ll get conscious of your incompetence, and that, unless it stops you, will guide you to competence.
- On the other hand, if you took on something more mental, like learning to share, or learning to write a thesis, you may go down the rabbit hole, thinking you are on the right track, while you are completely far… thinking you are in New York, while you are digging in Africa.
Arrogance, a concern to be considered brilliant, has your foot nailed to the floor.
Hurry
It’s Sunday, so I read more. I watched a Hungarian psychologist do a master course: What can we do for ourselves. He talked about people’s obsession to hurry, to fix things, to change things, to get to places, to never stop and ponder, the read to get through a book.
People’s unwillingness to become first, do second. To trust life. To have faith.
This lecture is the first thing, other than Hungarian poetry, that made me “home” sick.
Watching the faces and body language of the audience, makes me think again. Maybe there is no “home” for me.
And, OK, it is Sunday, so I watched a few movies’ trailers, among them the movie’s Rain Fall, because my new favorite books to read are by Barry Eisler.
And for the first time in 34 years, I found an American who speaks and writes proper English grammar that i don’t have to correct in my head… This whole week has been a week of firsts for me.
So I listened to his TED talk. And in the second part of that otherwise nothing special TED talk, Barry Eisler said something profound: your future self can guide you if you just listen keenly.
If, instead of being guided by desire (desire trap, yearning, longing) you allow fear to guide you, the fear that your future self will be disappointed, that it will be your fault the you didn’t do now what you needed to do to have what you wanted to have in the future, you will be guided right.
The worst thing, in my humble opinion and his, is to have regrets. You may already have some regrets, I know I do, but I won’t have any more. I have learned my lesson, finally, and I am now guided by that future self that doesn’t want to have regrets. That future self that wants me to do the things today, the things I need to do to have what i want in the future.
So what do I want?
I am in partnership with Source. And Source wants a methodology to redirect human evolution towards a humanity that can respect themselves, that can treat the Earth well, and can live in peace.
It is unlikely that I can see the fruits of that, but I can do the work. And my future self wants nothing more than that: do as much of that work that can be done in a human lifetime.
I am 71 years old now. My mother died when she was 75, my father when he was 79 years old. The previous generation, their parents died in the Holocaust. So I don’t know what is my genetic life expectancy.
I only know that I don’t want to die with regrets. So I do what I need to do every day, even on Sundays, to get done what I need to get done to create a tested blueprint for what Source asked me to do: the new humanity.
My Playground program is the current favorite. Because it is so interactive, I can almost instantly see what works, what doesn’t work for some, and I can always look for techniques, knowledge that may unstuck those that can’t move. Fascinating work. A delightful mixture of frustration and joy.
As long as I do today what I need to do today, I won’t have regrets in the future. And that is why I can be happy… today.
I have had students who quit because the desired future didn’t come fast enough, and today they don’t do anything that would create that desired future.
And, of course, I have active students, who have never done anything to bring that future about.
You cannot be happy today if your future self will be disappointed in you.
This was a long article… taking you on a meandering path, from the Que Sera Sera passive relationship to the future, to the active relationship to the future, where it is up to you.
It is YOUR life… What are you going to do about it?
