Present and Future (TRANSCRIPT)

00:00:00] Announcer: In life's journey. We must seek to reflect, learn, and grow. Welcome to the road to rediscovery with your host, Aubrey Johnson.

 

Aubrey Johnson: Hello, everyone. And I want to welcome you to this special solo episode of the Road to  rediscovery. I'm your host, Aubrey Johnson. The road to rediscovery is about reflecting on life's lessons to learn and grow, then taking it to the next level in helping others through dark times.

 

Today, I'd like to chat about, about the importance of understanding, how, what you take care of today will take care of you. In the future. Now let's think about that for a minute. We're always talking about reflecting on past lessons, right? And, and, and don't get me wrong. That is still a very [00:01:00] important thing to do.

 

We must always do that. But what if a lesson learned from a reflection teaches us to prepare ourselves in case this happens again, whatever the incident may be. I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with an app called calm. A calm is a meditation app. Now this isn't an ad for calm. Okay. But, it happens to be the app that I use when I do my daily meditation.

 

And I started this about three and a half years ago. And so at the end of every meditation session, the calm app gives you some, Thought provoking, profound words of wisdom, from past and present philosophers and, monks and just, dignitaries in, in that space. Okay. And I can't remember who exactly it was, but it was about a year ago after one of my [00:02:00] sessions, it had a quote and the quote said, you take care of the future by taking care.

Of the present after reading that, that kind of stuck with me, it really did. And the first thing I thought about what I read it was how relative it is at so many levels. Right. But what exactly does that mean? You take care of the future by taking care of the present? Well, for me to break down what it means, at least for me to understand.

I have to think in the most simplest of terms. And I'm a big fan of simplified thinking. So to me to relate this, I have to draw two examples. The first example is the story of the squirrel and the grasshopper. I don't know if you remember this story as a child. Growing up, but it's the classic story of a beautiful, [00:03:00] beautiful summertime day.

 

And the grasshopper happens to be hopping from blade to blade. He's laying up against trees taken naps. He's going to the Lake and just bouncing, you know, all throughout around the Lake. just having a. Good old time enjoying the fresh air, the sunshine, taking naps and the, the squirrel was just frantically working, right, going from tree to tree, gathering nuts and acorns and storing them in his tree.

 

And so. The grasshopper and looks at the squirrel and says, Oh, wow, man, you are working way too hard. You should relax. Like me. Everything's fine. Well, fast forward to the winter and the grasshopper was cold and starving. Did not have any food while the squirrel was cozy, nestled away in his [00:04:00] tree with lots of acorns.

 

Another example in a simplified story is the classic race between the tortoise and the hair. Right? Remember the hair, very fast, but also very cocky. Right? And, the hair just knew he would win. So they had a race and the hair was so fast. And so far ahead of the tortoise, he decided to take a nap and the tortoise while not.

 

Be in very fast, he was steady and consistent and stayed the course and just kept moving, kept moving, kept moving past the napping hair and fast forward to the future. The tortoise won the race. So in each of these, there was one whose effort of the present took care of themselves for the future. Right.

 

And for the other, their inactions made them ill prepared for when that future time came. [00:05:00] Now, let's talk about how this applies to real life and not a nursery, not nursery, tales from our childhood. I've had a rediscovery of this very principled, not very long ago. Go when I got hit with pneumonia, this was in mid June.

 

But to explain this, I want to rewind back to a very early time in my career. this would be my early twenties. All right. So when I started my first job out of college, there were so many different decisions I had to make around my job. Things like, how much to save for retirement, what type of medical coverage I thought I needed, at that point in my life, I was never in the hospital.

 

I I've never been sick, you know, much less a doctor's office, but I knew I needed some sort of medical coverage in case something happened. So I enrolled for these benefits as part of my job with the company, knowing I [00:06:00] need to have them, but not really having any example of when I would use it. So fast forward now to current times, I'm hit with pneumonia, eventually leading me to be admitted to the hospital.

 

So now I'm in my fifties, when this happens before this incident with pneumonia, I've been in the hospital only twice, once for prostate cancer and once for rotator cuff surgery. And that was it. But this third and most recent visits to the hospital, I found myself thinking about every little detail of the hospitalization process from being asked for my insurance card to fill it out the admission form, getting a chest X Ray EKG, having blood taken and drawn any at least twice a day and more so at this moment.

 

As I'm going through through all of these details. I started [00:07:00] to rediscover the image pact of my actions and decisions I made years ago in my early twenties, by enrolling in medical benefits with this example that enabled me to receive the care I now needed in my fifties. So in a nutshell, The decisions I made as my younger self years ago has taken care of my older future self today.

 

After having this rediscovery, my next thoughts and feelings were those of, of, of just gratitude, right? Just genuine gratitude, thankful for those decisions. Thankful for those efforts. Now I know full well that there are people in the world, Deni medical attention who may have limited or no medical coverage.

 

This may be for reasons beyond their control and my heart goes out to them. But with that said, please know that I truly believe the human right, and the need for medical care for one to be well and [00:08:00] alive should take priority over any costs. Any costs. So in closing, there's always a silver lining for those of you who know me, you know that I am a hopeless optimist.

 

There's always a silver lining, even in the darkest of days, as bad as I felt in the hospital with pneumonia, I rediscovered the importance of when you take care of the present, you also take care of the future. This applies to many different areas of our lives, not just medical coverage. And lastly, the gratitude that comes from this gives me a feeling of humility, a true feeling of humility and the broadened awareness to not take things for granted, whether they're big or they're small.

 

And that's it, everyone. I want to thank you all for tuning in and listening. And I invite you to subscribe via Apple podcasts. If you haven't done [00:09:00] so yet, and feel free to leave a rating and a short review, we're all roadies on this journey of life and it sure feels good having you on the journey with thanks again for listening and we'll chat again soon.

 

Announcer:  The road to rediscovery is an AJ shark production.