You’re busy trying to maintain or improve your life. Maybe you’re physically busy but a lack of time to plan means that you never get to arrange the moves that would save you. Or maybe you have too much time to plan and you procrastinate through over-consideration; you literally think yourself into non-action. Either way, it doesn’t seem like you’re moving forward. Or are you?
Goals provide can provide direction, but if the goal is too specific it can act as an unrealistic and therefore painful expectation. Your wants will be tied to your goals. And those wants will be painful if you assume your route to where you’re going is the straightest, most logical one. Sometimes it’ll be a crazy set of circumstances that lead you where you’re going without you even realising it.
Other times you’ll get the thing you aimed for and then wonder why you wanted it. Pretty much everyone who pursued a relationship (work or professional) that they left voluntarily will understand that feeling. It feels like you went the wrong way. But what exactly is wrong if there’s only so many feelings you can have? It’s not like any one route changes those. Those are about how you live, not where or with whom.
Just as their are agonised people in every situation, there are also very contented people living in almost every circumstance you can imagine, including suffering from illness and living in poverty. The fact that that is true doesn’t have to prevent us from being motivated to easing suffering, but it does point to the fact that the externals of our lives are not what dictates a good or bad life experience. You can’t make decisions about your life that build a perfect life.
If you look more closely at, and meditate seriously upon your life, there’s no evidence whatsoever that you actually know which way your life should go. There’s been plenty of times you fought for something you didn’t ultimately want. There’s been times where you cast things aside that you later realised were extremely important to you. You do this all the time, every day, with big and little things. You just have to start being more conscious.
Within the next 24 hours, talk with a friend or even an acquaintance,. Help each other find the strongest example you can find of a time where you totally fought against some idea only to realise later that it was a profound gift. Then find a time where you were completely dismissive of something that had great value.
Don’t do this to beat yourself up as though you made a mistake though. Do this and truly contemplate that the thoughts you’re having today are just that; thoughts. They are now judgments about then. They are not reality, reality changes as you change. Even the past.
Study your the connection between your thoughts and your emotional experience of reality. Being conscious of that function is the only route to anything that could even remotely be called, “the good life.” It isn’t how it is. It’s how you’re taking it. Resist less, flow more.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.
I help people achieve better mental health by teaching them about reality.
