Back to the Future
(and the future is NOW)
In case you are just joining me on this journey, I am a proud child of the 1980s. I was a teenager who lived for neon colors, jelly shoes, designer jeans, polo shirts and all things 80s culture. The Back to the Future movie franchise is one of my all-time favorites.
Doc Brown invented a Delorean time machine with a flux capacitor that had 1.21 gigawatts of power. It proved to be able to travel back in time and effect the future. And his protégé Marty McFly was the guinea pig driver. What a ride that movie was!
Marty soon learned that every little action or inaction he had while time traveling had a direct effect on his future. Throughout several hilarious sequences, he had to fix the relationship between his teenage parents and get them to fall in love before he and his siblings disappeared.
Along the way, he altered the future in a positive way and was able to change his father’s fate of a bumbling, spineless man to a successful, influential science fiction author. The movies always concluded with a happy ending, as all good movies do.
That made me recently think about my own opportunity for time travel. No…I haven’t come up with a newer, faster flux capacitor with more power!
I have realized, though, that everything I do today will affect who I am in the future. What would the future me in 20 years want to do differently today? How can what I do today change the trajectory of my metastatic breast cancer sentence?
Here’s what I came up with…buckle up!
The Future is NOW
Every day, with every meeting, phone call, and errand that I complete, I have the chance to influence my future. I can’t get so caught up in the “what ifs” of cancer that I forget to live my life.
I need to make a difference somewhere in my cancer community, my family and personal relationships, and my country. And I need to do it NOW. Not tomorrow, or next week, or next year when I’m not so busy. Not after I get the next PET scan saying I’m stable. Not after the next holiday or vacation or business trip.
I can only control what is right in front of me, around me, in this moment. I need to be aware of that every minute of every day. I need to listen to my body and rest when needed. I need to stop procrastinating on sending an email to a valuable prospect because I’m afraid of rejection.
I need to stop all my negative self-talk and remind myself that I’m fulfilling a purpose in my life that affects hundreds of thousands of people.
I need to influence my future self as well as the lives around me TODAY. While I still can.
Get Moving!
That looks to me like making a call or sending an email to someone who is influential in legislative advocacy. Making time to have an overdue coffee date with a friend who wants to support my mission. Picking up the phone and calling my relative who is struggling with her own stage 4 cancer battle to encourage her and gather more information for my advocacy platform.
Even taking a nap and going to bed early when my body says so!
All of this is designed to make my future self proud of the woman I am today. I want the Debbie in the future to say, “Girl, you’ve got this! I wouldn’t change a thing”.
Because that is what this is all about. Impacting my present to make a better future for myself, my family, my community. And making an impact on the hundreds of thousands of men and women who are struggling to live with metastatic breast cancer every day.
After all…would I really be fulfilling my purpose to go forth and be exceptional if I did anything less?
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