What does it mean to be a work in progress? It means that right now, at this very moment you are working on improving yourself in some way. You are not focused on a hypothetical version of yourself in the future.
You do not live in the future, you never will, so to focus all of your energy on a version of yourself that has yet to exist is to be living in your imagination. You cannot be present in the now if you are focused on living in your imagination. When you are constantly working on becoming someone that you visualize in your future, you will find yourself never being good enough, because that person that you have created is ever-changing. You will never catch up.
Now is all that truly exists and that never changes. The past does not exist. Only your memories of the past exist. The future never has existed in this reality, it only exists as a hypothetical in your own imagination. To think too much about the past, or the future is to bypass your right to experience now.
The only version of you that you are truly able to conceive of is the version of yourself that you are at this very moment. Right now, there are no hypotheticals. You know yourself right now. You cannot know the future in the same way that you know now. You cannot shape the future into what you want it to be without shaping the now first.
At this moment you can see your faults, your shadows, all of your short comings. You realize patterns that you default to and you know all of the times that you have disappointed yourself. If you are able to, try to remember the state of mind you were in when you let your shadow side tell you how you are, what you were or were not going to do and what you could have done differently.
This next paragraph is not for everybody. This is for the people who have set personal goals time and time again and just cannot seem to reach them. This can leave us in a vicious loop of wanting to be the best version of ourselves only to yet again miss our goals and continue in our pattern of self disappointment and frustration.
What are goals? Goals are another construct that only exist in the imagination. They can be very helpful when they are attainable. But there are times when goals can become overwhelming and have the opposite effect that we were hoping for.
When you are feeling overwhelmed, the best practice to start is to come back into yourself. Breathe. Listen to what is happening inside of your head. Listen to your shadow it challenges you. If you listen to that shadow closely enough, you will find power in it. It’s there to tell you about yourself, it tells you the parts of yourself that you need to work on, and the parts of yourself that you need to leave behind. Do your best to eliminate the emotion associated with it. Your shadow is there to help you navigate yourself.
Listen to your light. This is the part of you that is directly connected to the divine. Your light is always working for you, trying to help you align with your highest self. Your light can be harder to hear because a lot of the times your shadow will seem louder.
Be patient with yourself. Have grace and know that you do not have to wait to be the version of yourself that you want to be. You can be that person right now. In fact, this is the ONLY time you get to be the person that you want to be. There is no magic event that will occur in the future that will allow you to become the you that you have always wanted to be. That magic only exists in the now and the power that you have at this time to control what you do right now.
Do not look ahead, do not compare yourself to an imaginary version of yourself. Stay here in this moment, evaluate now, listen to your light and your shadow, and through action be who you decide you want to be at this moment.
You are neither your light, nor your shadow. You are what you do. So show yourself who you are right now. Shape your future through actions of love, and grace with the intention of reaching your own highest good.
