In a book titled “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, the author quoted E.L. Doctorow as saying that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Lamott added, “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.” In addition to writing, this is also a useful way to think about living our lives.

So many of us are trying to see as much as possible as we move throughout our day. And in doing so we are also attempting the impossible. We are looking behind us at the past often thinking “if only I did that differently, or hadn’t said or done something.” Or we are attempting to look ahead into the future often anxiously thinking “what if I don’t perform well, don’t get the job I want, or can’t meet my deadline.” We unconsciously carry the “if only’s” and “what if’s” with us throughout our daily lives, and the weight of this becomes exhausting and quite depleting. Actually, we really can’t see what’s just around the corner. Yet we continue carrying this very burdensome load.`

People who see me in psychotherapy do not initially complain about what I call the “monkey chatter” in their minds. They don’t complain about not focusing on themselves in the present or about the distractions of the past and future. They often complain about someone in their life, someone they’re unhappy with, someone they can’t change. What we begin looking at is what is most immediate or present in their lives. So when someone comes in with a great deal of emotional pain and fear related to their discovery of love for someone outside the marriage, we attempt to locate and access their “true feelings,” what they really want for themselves, and then how to trust those feelings. This is really challenging, because most of us have mixed or ambivalent feelings, and “we want our cake and eat it too.” So we have to work through these internal conflicts, these confusing feelings that we haven’t been clearly conscious or mindful of, and this kind of work is new to us, slow-going, frustrating, and painful in its own right.