Choosing to Decide Your Own Path Is Not Wrong
Even in the current world situation, you both can and should decide on your life choices.
Every single day of your life you are faced with choices.
The vast majority are pretty minor. When to get out of bed; what, where, and when to eat; what to wear; who to talk to; and so on. Small choices without which you would likely do nothing but turn into an unkempt lump barely recognizable as a human being.
Frequently, when it comes to the topic of choices, the focus and attention turn to larger matters. Who to date, what to do for a living, where to call home, when to spend large amounts of money on things like cars and houses, and so forth. Having to decide about things that could be life-altering garner the most attention because of their long-term impact.
It is extremely easy, whatever size choices you are making, to lose sight of the path you desire to be on. The pressure to decide on things faces up against overwhelming information about world problems, expectations of friends and family, and the expectations you have of yourself.
Each of these can impact you, but you ultimately get to decide how that impact will be felt and what it will do to a path you would wish to choose to take.
Facing overwhelming information and world problems
Spend any amount of time online and you will be swamped. The news is inescapable. The ongoing global pandemic too many people think is over; the protests over relentless police brutality and systemic racism; ongoing struggles for LGBTQA equal rights; a broken political system struggling to survive a criminal administration and their party of entitled supporters. That doesn’t even touch on world affairs, like burning rainforests and COVID-19 in other countries.
These are not matters to be ignored. However, neither can they overwhelm you and take up all your time. Why? Because to be perfectly blunt – there is little to nothing you can do about them.
Everything you CAN do has the slightest bit of selfishness to it. Except it’s not selfish at all.
You can vote, attend the protests, give money to charities that help people, wear a damned mask in public, and avoid joining crowds in restaurants and other indoor spaces to protect the workers and yourself. If testing becomes more widely available get a COVID-19 test.
The main issue with this, of course, is that the only real control that you have over anything is in regards to you. Your life, your thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. Recognizing this can help you practice mindfulness, which will give you the control to not allow all this overwhelming information to embed itself into your psyche.
When it still does, you can more easily root it out via mindfulness practices.
Be mindful and aware of the world and all that is going on – but don’t lose yourself, or your path, in the process.
Having to decide against the expectations of friends and family
I love my mom. She has always been there for me, and she was a real cheerleader for everything I did throughout my schooling.
She was a single parent in the 1980s when that was not the norm. Of course, my mom wanted to see great things for me and the life I would choose. In me, she saw a lot of potential.
However, even before I started actively Pathwalking and working with conscious reality creation, I tended to be independent and choose my own way.
My mom wanted to see me be someone wealthy and influential. As she once said to my wife (not long after she and I had gotten engaged) “he could have been a doctor or a lawyer.” (Yes, I have a legit Jewish mother).
She was sort-of being funny. But she was also serious.
Once I traveled halfway across the country to attend college, my mom ceased to really understand me or my motivations. She held onto her expectations of me and my life – and was disappointed when I didn’t pursue medicine, or law, or get married and start to raise a family of my own in my 20s or 30s.
This was not the path for me. I chose to decide for myself. I have no doubt had I desired to be a doctor or lawyer, I could have gone that way. But that’s not who I am.
Over the years, I have faced the expectations of others. From time to time, of course, I’ve met or exceeded them. I’ve also chosen to decide on something else that was more in line with my desires and paths.
Perhaps, at times, I have been selfish in this. But then you have to ask – who’s life is it, anyway?
Making the expectations of yourself more realistic
There are standards society expects of you. Let’s face it, in the United States, the main path in life is to go to college or trade school, get a job, start a family, work into your 60s or 70s, retire, move somewhere warm or travel or do whatever. This has been the One True Way™ for what seems like forever – but realistically, I think it’s been maybe 75 years or so (post-WWII).
This model, just FYI, is becoming increasingly unfeasible. The lifetime job is fading out, the middle class on which this model is based is being shredded, and too many people holding onto this idea are unwilling to move forward to the next.
Why am I bringing this up? Because this tends to root itself into your subconscious mind. You develop beliefs about how life should be – then set a bar for achievement and success. That bar, generally, tends to be a thing you will get to “someday” or “in time,” and neglects all the things that can and likely will happen from now to then.
You have created expectations for yourself that may be unrealistic. Or, though realistic, they put undue pressure upon you for achievement and success.
For example – your goal is to earn a million dollars. Not a bad goal. Now, why? What will having a million dollars do for you? How will it make your life more amazing?
What if, instead, your goal is to have ten percent more money than you need each month? If you need $3000 a month to cover all your expenses, your goal is to earn $3300 a month. Over a year you have earned $3600 above and beyond what you need.
This isn’t about lowering your expectations – just making them more realistic.
You can and should decide on your life choices
The only person living your life is you. As such, you know best what is right for you and your life. If you are dissatisfied, and if the pandemic has exposed places where your life can be changed for the better, when besides now should you start to work on that?
Today is the only real time there is. Tomorrow is never assured. For example, COVID-19 has killed 120,000 people and counting in the USA so far. That’s 120,000+ people who have no tomorrow anymore.
Harsh? Yes, it is. But that’s the reality of this moment.
Because there is a finite amount of time for you to live in this world, choosing to decide your own path Is not wrong. It is for you to live your life as only you know how to do it.
BUT – let me make this last plea. Be kind. Be empathetic. Treat other people how you desire to be treated. Think before you speak or post online, consider if what you add to the conversation is of value – or selfish and harmful.
When you decide to choose your path, please choose one that gives to rather than takes from the world.
Every beacon of hope in the world becomes brighter when that number is multiplied. Don’t fall for the false narratives and artificial lack and scarcity of the world. You are empowered to use mindfulness to find and/or create an incredible, abundant path for your life.
What will you decide on for your path today?
This is the four-hundred and forty-fourth journey into my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are ideas for – and my personal experiences with – mindfulness and walking along the path of life to consciously create reality. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way. I further desire to empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is availablehere. My additional writing, both fiction and non-fiction, are available here.
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