Laying Down The Future To Live Now: What Changes When Today Stops Earning Tomorrow

What if the future you’re chasing is quietly using your present?
That question cracked something open for me.

In this episode, I sit with how “highest path” language can slowly turn into pressure-how rest becomes strategy, how worth gets deferred to a day that never quite arrives. I speak honestly about laying down dreams I once loved deeply, not because they were wrong, but because they began defining me before they had a chance to live.

We explore the subtle shift from presence as preparation to presence as place. I reflect on years spent writing toward being received, how anticipation made the work feel heavy, and why losing propulsion isn’t the same as losing direction. There is grief here - gentle space to honor the version of ourselves who believed, carried on, and kept going with quiet devotion.

From within that tenderness, a different orientation emerges: coherence that fits this season, and practice that doesn’t audition for later. Being met stops looking like a finish line and starts feeling like a capacity we can grow now.

Along the way, I name simple, practical shifts - choosing smaller, truer ripples; creating without an imagined audience; noticing where energy is still tethered to “later.” I offer three grounding questions to soften the habit of postponement:

• What would change if presence didn’t need to earn a future?
• What would soften if today wasn’t in service of arrival?
• What becomes possible when who you are right now is not provisional?

If you are loosening dreams that once kept you alive, consider this a companion for the walk - unrushed, unresolved, and more than enough.

If this conversation meets you, you’re welcome to follow the show or share it with someone rethinking timelines of their own. Your reflections help keep this space honest and rooted in what’s real.

Chapters

• 0:44 The Pressure Of The “Highest Path”
• 1:38 Realizing The Orientation Hasn’t Changed
• 4:14 Naming The Grief Of Letting Dreams Go
• 7:02 Releasing Identity From Arrival
• 10:11 Presence Used Instead Of Lived
• 12:28 Not Abandoning Vision, Loosening Attachment
• 16:19 Losing Propulsion, Finding Capacity

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:22

A desire to walk the highest path and envisioning every choice, creating a timeline and aligning to the highest is only useful until it builds pressure, after which it distorts truth. I want to begin this episode by naming something that I didn't see clearly until very recently. I thought I was walking the highest path or walking to it. And in many ways I was, but I was holding it in a way that applied pressure and made it theoretical instead of contextual and aspirational instead of lived. In truth, there is no singular highest path floating above you that you can miss. There is only the highest coherence available from where you actually are. Not from where you imagine you could have been, not from an abstract, optimized future self, but from this exact configuration of body and life and history and capacity and season, which is why the highest path is always contextual and not theoretical. I had that language before I had the embodiment. In 2025, the effort was obvious. I was moving toward a future where I would be met, where my work would land, where the years of devotion would make sense in the eyes of others. And I told myself that 2026 was different. It's softer and more spiritual and more rooted and more inward. It's rest and nourishment and grounding. But what I didn't see at first, because we're we're only just in January when these truth bombs started arriving, was that the orientation hadn't actually changed. Even in the softer clothes, I was still walking toward something, toward arrival and toward validation and toward a destination that would confirm that my walk and my faith and my persistence had been worth it. And that's hard to admit. Because from the outside it looked healthy and it sounded aligned. It even felt gentler in my body. But underneath it, there was still anticipation and still waiting and still a quiet agreement with the future that said, if I rest now, later I can be met. I was asking for the future to justify the present. So what I'm sharing today is different than how I usually speak. Often I walk something first, and then I come back later with language and with insight and with clarity. And this time I'm speaking inside of it. And what I've realized is this for my rest to be real and not strategic and not preparatory, for my presence to be honest and not performance, for my writing to be alive and not aimed at future readers who may never exist. I have to put my dreams down. And I feel that in my chest when I say it. Because these dreams aren't shallow. They aren't ego fantasies. They are the dreams that I have walked with for years. Dreams that have sustained me, and dreams that have motivated me, and dreams that have held me in empty rooms when no one was responding, when no one was witnessing. Dreams that held a younger version of me upright. A girl who walked humbly and who trusted deeply, and who has negotiated her value in deferment because her faith was so sincere. I am grieving her, not because she was wrong, but because she carried so much with quiet devotion. And from where I'm speaking now, is inside of that grief. And inside of it, I know that I wasn't chasing the future. I was postponing permission to fully belong to the present. Just a few weeks ago, very few weeks ago, I shared that I was becoming quieter and more inward, that I wanted to write, to tell stories, to reach a larger audience. I even named a writer that I admire whose path I thought aligned. And I thought that was clarity. But what I see now is that my sense of worth was still quietly tied into being received. And because of that, I couldn't write at all. January has been open and spacious and available, but writing into destiny is heavy. Writing with anticipation collapses presence. So here I am, sooner than I expected, realizing that the place I'm being asked to stand requires releasing the very dreams that once kept me alive. Before I go any further, I want to be very clear about something. I am not saying that planning is wrong, or that holding the future is a mistake, or that vision somehow separates us from truth. The future can be a beautiful thing to hold, a beautiful thing to steward. What I'm being asked to release right now isn't the future itself. It's the way I wrapped my identity and my value around arriving there. That sense that our lives are meaningful and intentional and patterned, and we get to dance within the dots in our own beautiful way. And I still believe that. The picture that would make sense of every line that I had faithfully drawn. And that is where the distortion crept in. Presence became preparation and rest. My year of inward leaning, my rest became strategy and expression became rehearsal. Nothing was wrong with the dots, nothing is wrong with the picture. But when arrival becomes the place where worth lives, the present moment gets subtly used instead of lived. So this isn't about abandoning dreams, it's about releasing them for me, for now. So they stop defining who I am before they ever arrive. And I'm not going to romanticize this. I showed up today with a box of cleenecks and hopefully waterproof mascara, though I'm not sure. This isn't easy and it isn't clean, and it isn't without heartache. There is grief for futures that I carried with devotion, futures that gave meaning to long seasons of faith. And I want to say this without spiritual bypassing. I trust that I am moving towards walking as my soul's mission, not towards it. I trust that there is steadiness on the other side of this grief that does not require witnesses. But I will not deny the ache in the meantime. I will not rush it. I will not turn this into a lesson too quickly, except, you know, here where I just air my dirties out for you all. I'm not tidying it up because it's true. And I have been walking what has felt utterly disorienting. Because everything for years and years, everything that I have done and read and worked towards has been in the direction of a future I am lying down. And walking without a compass is not comfortable. But my soul is asking that I release the future so that I can experience the present more honestly. And I know that I'm not losing direction more than in this short term. I'm losing propulsion, and those are not the same thing. So that I can begin seeing my life complete in its worth and tend from there. Meaning is not something the future grants. Meaning is something you consent to experience now. And being met, this is what I'm trying to know that that being met is not a destination. It is a capacity. And it seems that my vessel had to break. The programs, the echoes that I thought pointed to a future event were just a present withholding. That I have learned that presence required anticipation and that part of me required waiting. And that vessel has been going through a massive shattering as I release these programs and the dreams that held them upright. I have needed to break open and allow my nervous system to release the need and the expectation that I will be met later, that an audience that will validate my work is somewhere out there. Otherwise, as I journal, as I rest, as I unbraid, I will still be hoping that I'm doing enough, that I'm doing it correctly for the next piece to fall into place. So though I thought my goal of the year was to be more present, the presents had a price tag. So my new goal is to get to a place where I can say that my life is enough, even if the ripples that I make are small. And to get to a place where I can say that and not feel like a little part of me is chattering. And I will tell you, I still have some grieving to do to be there. The woman who walked me here was brave, and we are having an extended goodbye. So I want to say this if you are listening and finding yourself in a similar place, though maybe not the same place, where but a place where the dreams that once gave you direction are asking to be loosened. I want you to hear this. It does not mean that your devotion was misplaced, and it does not mean that your faith was naive, it does not mean that your path was wrong. Sometimes the dreams were the bridge, not the destination. And sometimes the most faithful thing that we can do is to put them down with tenderness and stand where we are without knowing who, if anyone, will meet us there. So if you're here too, not finished and not resolved and not certain, I want to offer this as an inquiry and not an instruction. What would change if your presence didn't need to earn a future? What would soften if today wasn't in service of arrival? What might become possible if you trusted that who you are right now is not provisional? That's where I am today, still walking and inquiring, still grieving and still honest and still here. And for now, that is enough. I can thank our Soul Circle Reflections for helping me realize that my energy wasn't fully present. It was held in a future that even my rest was in service to. If you would like to join us for February Soul Circle, our live gathering will be on February 1st. And then we just have quiet reflections to carry on your own throughout the month. The link is below to register and get that meeting link. And now I have freed myself up from writing for an audience or trying to navigate compilation or distribution. I am allowing the Keeper's Garden on Patreon to be where I publish my work. No audience needed, no distribution, no destiny, no pressure, just writing that feels honest and true. You are welcome to walk or witness with me there. Thank you for listening and for providing me this therapeutic session where I tell you that just a couple of weeks into January, I have pumped the brakes and am changing direction. And that direction for right now is still. I love you. Thanks for listening.