Very Few Choices Are Written in Stone and Can’t be Made Anew
Recognizing and acknowledging this is very empowering.
I have long believed that there are three ways to live life.
Let life live you. Mostly live by rote, routine, and habit. Let what happens happen. Overall, you just accept what’s given, that things are a certain way, and you make only a few active, mindful choices for the direction of your life. Overall, however, you just roll with what happens around you.
Curl up in a ball and await death. While this can be literal, it’s largely not. This is choosing to see life as mostly a struggle, almost always challenging, and that there’s little to no point in giving a shit. This can also be applied to anyone more focused on an afterlife than this life and those trying desperately to live in the past of nostalgia (which is seldom how things truly were).
Take life like a bull by the horns and go for a ride. You make choices and decisions and actively work on living life as fully as possible. You seek to drive your life in a given direction to achieve that which you desire.
In my experience. I’ve seen these notions proven time and again. I know people who live predominately within each of these given ways.
It’s also important to recognize and acknowledge that everyone shifts between these. Sometimes you go for the ride, other times you let life live you, and unfortunately, there are times you want to curl up in a ball and await death. Welcome to the human condition.
It often seems easiest to choose the first two options. Yet that’s simply not true. However, the reason, I believe, why it appears to be so, comes down to one issue.
What if you choose wrong?
Let’s address the elephant in the room. You will choose wrong. As a human being, you’ll make mistakes, fuck it all up, make terrible choices, and choose wrong. That’s how it works.
Nobody gets every choice and decision right. Nobody. Everyone makes poor, unfortunate, and outright wrong choices and decisions along the way.
This can be incredibly frustrating. Worse, however, is that it can also lead people to make few to no choices and decisions. Instead, they let life live them and allow the subconscious to do the driving. I’ll cover this further later.
Fear of making the wrong choice or decision, wherever it might come from, has stopped more than one person from making choices and decisions. You can’t get wrong what you don’t choose. Right?
Not exactly. By not choosing, you make a choice. Thus, you live subconsciously and allow whatever will happen to happen. You cede your power and potential control.
This might seem harsh, but it’s the truth. Not choosing or deciding is a choice. Choosing wrong is unavoidable. However, unless that wrong choice kills you, you get to choose and decide anew.
Few choices are written in stone and can’t be made anew
Unless the choice you make kills you, you get to choose again.
No, you can’t undo the choice. Most of the time you can’t necessarily change the choice or decision already made. However, you can nearly always make new choices and decisions.
What’s more, you get to do so with new knowledge. That’s because your prior choices and decisions, even when they’re wrong, can teach you new things. That, in turn, allows you to make new and better decisions and choices.
To be fair, even when you learn something from wrong choices and decisions, it might suck mightily. They might lead to pain and suffering, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or some combination of these. Yet this can also be a learning opportunity.
So long as you are still here, you have opportunities to make new choices and decisions. You can choose anew if you’ve chosen wrong or poorly.
The key to it all is active conscious awareness.
The tug ‘o-war between the conscious and subconscious mind
All human beings are of three minds.
The unconscious mind. This is what drives your organs, makes your neurons fire, your heart beat, your lungs breathe, and so on. With the partial exception of heartbeat and breathing, you have zero control of this, but neither do you need it. It simply is and does.
The unconscious mind. This is where your memories, beliefs, values, and habits live. It is via the unconscious mind that you can exist in rote and routine. This, frankly, is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. I’ll explain that shortly.
The conscious mind. This is where your present, active mindset/headspace/psyche self, lives. It is the conscious mind where you make choices and decisions. The conscious mind is also how you can connect with your subconscious mind. That’s how you can see your beliefs and values, call up memories of the past now, and recognize habits (which can be changed by the conscious mind, actions, choices, and decisions as such).
When you avoid making choices and decisions, your subconscious mind tends to take the wheel. Habits big and small are driving what you’re doing as you let life live you. It appears to be easy, but it comes with a price. That price is dissatisfied with things on one level or another. This, in turn, is likely to gnaw at you in some way. Until you consciously recognize and address it, however, it’ll function on autopilot.
Here’s the wildest part of this. Only human beings have a subconscious mind. Specifically, when it comes to beliefs and values. No other animals on this planet – that we know of – have beliefs and values like we do.
What about habits, rote, and routine?
Other animals have been observed with habits and routines. However, those are part of their unconscious mind. This is often referred to as animal instinct.
Humans have instincts, too. However, we’ve evolved to run them through our beliefs, values, and even subconscious memories. This is why so many people find it challenging to follow or trust their gut. They feel an urge, a need, to run it through the subconscious. What’s more, they might be doing that utterly automatically by rote and routine.
The upside to the subconscious mind is how it allows humans to create amazing things. That’s because the subconscious mind is where dreams, imaginations, and the deep thoughts we have, live.
The existence of the subconscious mind is how humans are capable of creating the tools we have, living in any environment no matter how extreme, and imagining fictions and sharing them.
The rest of the animal kingdom, as far as we know, has no such mind. They have the unconscious and the conscious only. That’s why they are “primitive” or “natural” in their choices of habits, life activities, and so on. They haven’t the imagination to turn dreams into reality of a subconscious mind that humans have.
Crazy, no?
Recognizing that choices can almost always be made anew
Marriages end in divorce. However, second marriages can be far better than first marriages. Jobs are lost. However, that can pave the way to entrepreneurship or better jobs. Skydiving can lead to broken bones. However, you can also have an amazing life experience and a good story to tell that you didn’t before.
All of this speaks to the truth that most choices aren’t written in stone and can be made anew. That might mean you don’t choose that next time, but that’s a choice and decision you’re making.
The truth is that you have a finite time on this planet, in that body, experiencing this life. Sure, sometimes there are days where just letting life live you is necessary. Also, there are awful times when the idea of curling up in a ball and awaiting death feels like all you’ve got. However, you can always change your life to take charge, take life like the bull by the horns, and drive.
Please keep an open mind about this, and let’s recognize and acknowledge a few important facts. You will choose wrong or poorly, and the result might suck. However, making the choice, even when wrong, empowers you. There is seldom a one-and-done choice. You’ll get new choices and decisions all the time. Choosing and deciding can be hard. However, doing so actively empowers you. That is where you can take the limited control of your life that you have.
One last thought. Think about a time when you had a tough choice to make that resulted in something great. It might not have been easy, and it might have been frustrating. However, after you made it, didn’t you feel amazing? Did it make you feel like you were doing the driving? That is the reason why making choices and decisions is empowering and worthwhile.
Can you see that even bad choices can be chosen anew most times?
This is the six-hundred and twenty-seventh (627) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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