“You can’t see the wonders that are coming”
When I’m facing a setback, a lack of confidence, a blue mood, I remind myself: “You can’t see the wonders that are coming.”
The phrase comes from John Green’s The Anthropocene Revisited, where he tells the real-life story of Jerzy Dudek. Dudek’s father was a coal miner in a Polish mining town, and so, at ten years old, he assumed he would be a coal miner too. “What else are we going to do?”
Like other boys his age, he also loved football. But “leather balls were hard to come by in his impoverished community, so they usually played with rubber balls or even tennis balls.” He was usually the goalkeeper because he was tall, though he wasn’t very good.
By seventeen, his miner training started. He began working there two days a week and also joined the company football team, wearing his father’s work gloves complete with a hand-drawn Adidas logo to make them look real.
By nineteen, while still working at the mine, he was playing goalkeeper for a semipro team, earning a bit over $100 a month.
By twenty-one, he felt himself “melting into the grayness.”
But that’s not how the story turned out. Through a combination of grit and luck, the young goalkeeper went on to play for Liverpool and make the dramatic saves that led to victory in the 2005 championship against Milan.
John Green, who also writes about his struggles with depression, describes how the uncertainty of the future can be a cause for hope, a reason to persist.
“Someone tell ten-year-old Jerzy Dudek that he is going to save two penalties in a European cup final… Someone tell twenty-one-year-old Jerzy Dudek playing for $1800 a year that he is a decade away from lifting the European cup.”
“You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, buy you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
Jerzy Dudek lifting the European Cup (Photo credit: Reuters)
When you’re fearful or lacking confidence, “What if?” can be a scary question.
How can you change that?
One technique we use in Working Out Loud is the “Letter from Your Future Self.” In Week 7 of our original method, you write from a future perspective, describing to your present self the goals you achieved, how your future self feels, and a possible path you took to get there. You focus on possibilities and positive actions instead of obstacles.
Sometimes the words alone—“You can’t see the wonders that are coming”— are enough to stop me from “melting into the grayness.”
“Moments of light-soaked joy” are easier to see when we actively look for them.
A useful reminder I refer to when I’m struggling to be positive.