What Just Happened?

Casey Neistat videos never cease to amaze me. I used to watch his videos daily when he did the vlog and stopped watching when he stopped the vlog. Lately, he hasn’t been uploading that much. Today I saw his video in my subscription box and something about it just made me click it, and I am so glad I did. It is the kind of inspiration one needs at the start of a new year.

Casey makes a great observation. When we are young, we determine our identity mostly by what our aspirations for our future are. What we want to be when we grow up, where we want to live, how much money we want to make. Our past doesn’t come much in the picture.

As we grow old, we have lots of experience a lot of important moments in our lives. Slowly, these moments start having an effect on our identity. By the time we are in our 30s, our past defines us just as much as our future. We are a sum of things we have done and things we wanna do.

But the sort of ‘existential’ conclusion of all this is, what do we do when our past is all that defines us? when we don’t have anything to look forward in our future. When our best days are behind us?

the TL;DR is this. All of that is irrelevant. With all this talk about the past and the future, we are forgetting the most important time of all, the present. This is what Casey’s hero, his 91-year-old Nana had to say

“I don’t think about the future. When I wake up every morning, I am so grateful to have one more day, that that is what I focus on. I focus on right now.”

And from this day onwards, that is what I’ll try to focus on as well!