You Can Choose Your Own Life
Choosing and deciding is how you have any control at all.
Unless you’ve been asleep for years, or locked away in a cave, or hiding out on a tropical island somewhere, you know shit has gotten weirder. Reason and logic seem to be increasingly out to lunch. Greed, ambition, and screwing over others to advance yourself seem to be all the rage.
Many, many people feel as if they are being wronged by “others”. There’s a great deal of false narratives claiming that “those people” are why certain ways of life are dying out, why certain types of jobs are fading away, and all sorts of other societal matters causing people distress both real and imagined.
It is incredibly disturbing, distracting, and uncomfortable. Absolutely unnecessary divisions are being torn wider and wider apart, usually by people who profit from false conflict and competition. Why not orchestrate it when it’s not naturally occurring?
It’s easy to feel lost, sad, scared, uncertain, angry, hopeless, and the like. A whole lot of unnecessary suffering might be on the way, and there is little to nothing most of us can do about it.
Yet no matter what’s going on in the world outside of you, you can choose your own life. Who, what, where, how, and why you are can be chosen by you.
This might look like a lie. Admittedly, there might be certain restrictions around money, jobs, children, others you must care for, and the like. Yet when it comes to your life, so long as you are alive you have choices and decisions available to you.
Everything is an inside job
Among the many false narratives, one especially pervasive one is that you need outside help or assistance to get anything done. Even many of the supposedly self-made business and political leaders of the world got seed money or connections from a parent or teacher, took credit for the work of others on their staff, or otherwise were helped to get where they are.
I’m not entirely poo-pooing outside assistance. The only way to learn something new is via outside help. A teacher, guru, book, friend, and the like can show you a new or different way from what you already know.
However, the only way you choose your own life is when you make the choices and decisions to do so. I can’t make any choices or decisions for you. Sure, I can make suggestions, cajole and coerce you to my way of thinking – but you alone choose and decide.
When you get right down to it, you are who, what, where, how, and why you are because of choices and decisions that you’ve made. Yes, you’re also who, what, where, how, and why you are because of choices and decisions that you didn’t make. But that was yet another choice and/or decision on your part.
Everything about your life, when all is said and done, comes from within you. That’s because nobody but you is in your head, heart, and soul. Nobody else can think your thoughts, feel your feelings, and take actions or not for you. Only you have the power to do that.
Choices and decisions are made by you both consciously and subconsciously. In either case, it’s always an inside job.
You choose your own life mindfully or mindlessly
Everyone is of three minds. Unconscious, subconscious, and conscious.
The unconscious mind is fully automated and directs how your lungs breathe, heart beats, neurons fire, and so on.
The subconscious mind is semi-automated. This is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories live. The subconscious mind is like a sponge, absorbing everything it’s exposed to without filters. Without filters, you can find yourself lost and seemingly out of control.
The conscious mind functions here and now. It’s not automated, and it’s engaged by specific external and internal factors. The external factors are your senses – smell, taste, touch, sight, sound, instinct. Your internal factors are your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approaches, and actions.
The external is how you, in your body, engage with the world around you. The internal is how you process it. Working with these is how you become consciously aware.
Awareness is within and without. Yet the focus of education, advertising, media, and the like is so heavily on the external that the internal is often left flailing in the wind like one of those air-powered advertising dummies on a roadside.
Did you know that every single choice and decision that you make comes from within you? Sure, it might be influenced by people, places, and things outside of you – but it all still originates within you.
That’s why and how you ultimately choose your own life.
Choose your own adventure with kindness, compassion, and empathy
You can choose your own life, no matter who, what, where, how, and/or why you are, presently. But beware of the false narratives of selfishness.
You and I live in a world among 8 billion other people. All 8,000,000,000 of us have different desires, dreams, ambitions, goals, and internal motivations. Some might align, some might be similar, but no two people are alike.
It’s not selfish to choose your own life. Each and every person on Earth can choose your own life. That should not, however, disregard others.
I’m not talking about the assholes trying to deny the rights and freedoms of other people on spurious bullshit. If you’ve read this far, you’re not one of them, and likely live largely removed from them. Yet you still interact with other people directly in your life. This is where applied kindness, compassion, and empathy matter.
Everybody everywhere wants to receive kindness, compassion, and empathy. Especially those who consider kindness, compassion, and empathy to be weak. Them most of all.
You can’t make choices or decisions for anyone but yourself. Active conscious awareness – mindfulness – is where you begin. The recognition and acknowledgment of this is a first step toward changing the collective consciousness and moving away from this fear-based society to a more reason-based one.
You begin with yourself. You start with your own choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are. Then you choose your own life. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. Worthwhile? Absolutely.
What choices and decisions with you consciously make today?
This is the six-hundred-eighty-second (682) 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 my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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