You Choose Your Own Adventure Every Day
Even on the days it feels like a slog you make choices and decisions.
Consciously or subconsciously, you’re always making choices and decisions. When you allow your subconscious mind to do most of the work via rote and routine, it will feel like you’re not choosing and deciding anything.
That, however, is because of the passive nature of the subconscious mind. Everything in your subconscious is passive unless engaged consciously.
Your conscious mind has two facets to it. One looks outside and absorbs data via your six senses. The other looks inside and can access your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and all of your beliefs, values, habits, and subconscious memories.
Conscious awareness is active participation in your life experiences. Rather than living subconsciously, you make choices and decisions consciously.
This applies to big, medium, small, and seemingly insignificant choices and decisions. The big stuff includes major life-changing things like marriage and divorce, moving, college education, bariatric surgery, and the like. Medium stuff includes big purchases, vacations, buying and selling stocks, and so on. The small stuff is choosing what to wear today, where to go to dinner, the route you take from point “a” to point “b”, etc.
The seemingly insignificant choices and decisions tend to be the most rote, routine, and subconscious. Because they’re so numerous, they’re far more important than we often credit them for. This includes choices and decisions about when to get out of bed, scrolling social media, what you eat and drink, how you brush your teeth, what tabs you leave open on your browsers, and other seemingly insignificant matters.
Nothing you choose is truly insignificant. That’s because you choose your own adventure every day.
The seemingly insignificant is significant
You make hundreds, if not thousands of choices and decisions daily. For that reason, it’s good that many of the seemingly insignificant are done automatically.
Rote, routine, and habit are part of your subconscious mind. That’s where the automation lives. This allows you to do things with no conscious thought.
For example, when was the last time you thought about your eating routine? Not what, when, or where you’re eating, but the process itself. Do you chew your food thoroughly, or tend to wolf things down? Are you a person who takes drinks between bites, or only before and after you’ve eaten the solids? Do you savor the taste of what you eat or only vaguely recognize it? Are you a one-thing-at-a-time eater, or do you mix and blend plates and bowls of sustenance?
Most of the above is likely so deeply ingrained in you that you don’t give it thought. But you did, at one time. That’s how you developed the habit and routine you employ in how you consume food.
Seemingly insignificant. Except when you are changing dietary habits. Now you have a reason to reconsider all the above and see how changing these automated actions impacts you and your health, wellness, and wellbeing. That seemingly insignificant matter becomes significant when you are choosing your own adventure that is this life.
Shifting the subconscious to conscious awareness is where mindfulness comes in. Specifically engaging the inward-looking facet of your conscious mind.
The adventure of life is yours to choose
Active conscious awareness can seem like a major challenge. This is especially poignant when you consider all the messages recommending subtly and blatantly that you let this, that, or the other thing do your work for you.
The truth is that you, and only you, live inside your head, heart, and soul. You’re the only one who can make choices and decisions for you and the adventures of your life. Ergo, you choose your own adventure via mindfulness.
Mindfulness is applied active conscious awareness, By questioning your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions, you gain awareness, consciously, of them. This applies to all things, big, medium, small, and seemingly insignificant.
You choose to turn things over to rote, routine, habit, and subconscious action. And you can choose to reclaim them to change them.
Nothing in life is written in stone, save birth, life, and death themselves. Everything else is up for grabs. Change is the one and only constant in the Universe. You get to decide and choose your own adventure on every level. Sometimes that’s within moral, societal, environmental, and situational constraints. Yet most of those are artifices you can choose and decide to walk away from.
The real question is – do you choose the path for your life, let it be chosen for you, or just go with whatever happens, happens?
Adventure is where you find and/or make it
It’s important to recognize and acknowledge that subconscious rote, routine, and habit are necessary. There are so very many choices and decisions to make daily that you simply can’t make them all via conscious awareness without going slightly mad.
However, if you’re discontent, unhappy, frustrated, and seeking a new adventure for your life’s paths, now the subconscious might need to be surfaced to the conscious awareness. Then, via mindfulness, new choices and decisions are made to drive desired change.
Often the focus is on the big and medium choices and decisions because of their overall impact. To get to them, however, you can’t disregard and leave to your subconscious the small and seemingly insignificant choices and decisions. Why? Because the big and medium are made up of the small and seemingly insignificant.
Think about it. The seemingly insignificant and small things, when grouped together and combined, form the bases for the medium and large choices and decisions.
The true meaning of life is TO LIVE. It’s all about your experiences, doings, learnings, growth, evolution, and the like. You have the power to choose and decide your paths, and your adventure. It won’t be easy, but I think it’s utterly worthwhile. And so are you.
Remember, you are worthy and deserving of choosing your own adventure for your life experience. You’re empowered to feel the empowerment and be actively, consciously aware. Mindfulness puts you in the driver’s seat. From there, you can choose and decide to cross the next ridge, take a different route, make that left turn at Albuquerque, or whatever you desire. Your adventure is the product of the choices and decisions, no matter the size, you actively consciously make.
Can you see how you can and do choose your own adventure?
This is the six-hundred fifty-first (651) 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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