is the only one you know you have for sure."
~Oprah Winfrey~
Someone once said to me that either life is happening to you, or you are happening to life. Its a profound dichotomy. It allows you to take any moment in your life, and measure it beneath column A or column B, if you choose to do so. Putting it that simply is a very telling revelation to the strength of your will to live your own life. Our experiences begin to shape our character and write our history from the day we are born. Lets face it, for the first part of our lives, the world happens to us. We rise up through a period of conscious and unconscious information gathering, sensory perceptions that, over time, build the very fabric of our character. Its like we are in this insatiable phase of learning; engineering our personalities inside of us. We experience joy, pain, love, heartbreak, security, abandonment, confidence, and so on. But eventually, after the character development has matured, we come across a critical moment in our life, and many more will follow. These moments could be so many different things, times, places, feelings, senses, but what they have in common is that they confront you with a thought or feeling that is telling you "something has to change". And you are confidant in that moment, you have a very very assertive tone inside your mind that is convinced that change is necassary, we need to redirect here! I'm not talking about the overwhelmingly emotionally tramautic moments in life where you are fighting for your life, I'm talking about the somewhat quiet time of reflection where you just know, and your rationale that follows flows effortlessly and unabided from fear.
Pause time completely for a moment. It is here and now that your choice becomes I am going to happen to life, or life is going to happen to me (within the context of the thought). Before that, maybe you were oblivious and had no idea, but now you do and you are confidant that you need to move down a new path. Much of our life is subconscious and reflexive and is doing absoluteley no harm to us, but we are beautifully designed creatures that all seek some kind of meaning - and moments like this are our chance to get closer to it. Perhaps its in these moments that we truly hear God, and we get our chance to choose. When we DO choose, though, it means we have to let go of something. And that's where it all becomes so hard and that perfectly logical rationalization becomes a distant memory. The pain can cause us to grow stronger, or find the shortest route back to the old path and make it stop!
Changing always involves letting go, forcing us into a more conscious world where we are vulnerable and exposed again like a child. The older and more entrenched the old ways were, the harder it is to let go! The harder the change, the more exhausting it is to keep going! So why is letting go so hard? Why do we have those "ah ha!" moments of brilliance and confidence, only to have them snuffed out days later from the pain of letting go? We get confused and can't think clearly any more and build an argument to return to the days before we were aware of this need for change. Basic and emotional messages enter the mind "I cant do this"..."I'm scared"..."I'm not going to make it"..."I want to go back!"... or "Fuck this!" When you hear them in your mind, do they sound as well thought out as the original thought towards the opposite? Do they sound mature and articulated, or do they have a highly emotional, child-like essence to them? What do we feel in our bodies as we experience this painful "letting go" process? Its really no different than any other change, its just that this is one that we chose so we, in essence, invited the stress response upon ourselves. Its hard to imagine quitting your job just because you dont like it, yet if you lost it - you could get over it, you could move on. Its hard to imagine breaking up with someone you love but arent working with, but if they cheated on you and broke your heard, you could get over it , you could move on. Its hard to imagine suddenly completely changing your physical health routine, but if it suddenly became the law that you must go to the gym every day or go to jail, you could change and go, and get over the couch that you missed spending so much time on.
The stress response is hard to deal with, and it begins when we experience change. As if we don't face enough, its even harder to deal with when it seems like you brought it upon yourself! "Why am I doing this to myself? It wasnt that bad!". The stress response was designed to get you back to safety, but in doing so it also has to redirect your resources! Physiologically, blood moves to the muscles and areas where fight or flight becomes more effective - and away from the brain and the immune and digestive system. We feel like shit when we are stressed and to make matters worse, we quite literally cannot think clearly! There is no flight, there is no fight, so with our limited brain capacity - we begin to have thoughts in our minds about returning to the old state, even seeking out affirmations through conversations, music, reading. This feeling of weakness will all go away if I could just get back to the way I was before, before I brought this change on. That is your moment. Your moment to breathe deeply, think as clearly as you can (sometimes repeating something very basic that reminds you why the change is good) returns you to that state where you can rationally think again. Every time you can succesfully prevail, demonstrates your will and strength and will give you an understanding of just how much you have and can grow on. Yeah, its shitty the way we are designed sometimes, physiologically allergic to change, but that same bio-engine has unlimited potential for taking anything you truly want in life.
When we know what we need to do, we are no longer ignorant of the question: Are we happening to life? Or is life happening to us?
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