When You Accept Your Circumstances, You Become Disempowered
Straight to the point, I’m not going to sugarcoat this.
Before my premise hits anyone instantly wrong, please allow me to explain myself. First, and foremost, in no way, shape, or form am I dismissing anyone’s circumstances. The world has gone mad, lots of people are suffering, and your life might be shit right now for any number of reasons. In no way am I dismissing that, your feelings, or you.
What I’m on about here is those who accept their circumstances without looking for choices, options, potential, or possibilities to alter and/or change them. Again, you might be in a lousy position right now with very limited choices. But if you’re here, and alive, you HAVE choices, even if they are not perfect or ideal.
Exercising choice is like exercising any other muscle. The more you do it, the stronger it gets. When you actively, consciously, mindfully make choices, you are working your choice muscle. That is empowerment at its core.
What prompted this? I have a friend who has spent the last few years in a lousy life situation. Rather than make some choices and decisions to move out of that, they’re accepting their circumstances. Even when you point out options, potential, and possibilities, they may give slight acknowledgment, if any. But then they continue to choose not to choose. Rinse. Repeat. And they accept their circumstances and attendant disempowerment.
Any choices made via conscious awareness are better than no choices at all. Why? Because choice is empowerment. Empowerment opens you to take what control you can of your life experience.
This is, of course, imperfect, for many reasons.
Choosing between the lessers
Again, you might be in a lousy, bad, awful place on many levels right now. The increasingly authoritarian government policies may have you constantly looking over your shoulder and feeling paranoid. Maybe your job or living situation is unideal. You might be struggling with depression, uncertainty, and any number of issues that might be utterly out of your control.
I understand this. However, when you accept your circumstances and stop choosing or deciding to take action, you accept disempowerment. Basically, you’re telling the Universe in no uncertain terms, “Fine. Whatever. I’ll accept this shit sandwich and stop trying to swap it out for something else.”
The problem is that your best current option might not be a tastier sandwich. I might be that you can only trade up your shit sandwich for a mud sandwich. Mud is still better than shit, but not great. However, today’s mud sandwich is tomorrow’s grass sandwich. Each lesser choice exercises the muscle of choice, and in time, you get to something you can actually enjoy.
It’s not often you get to step from horrific circumstances to excellent ones. Between horrific and excellent, you might need to take stepping stones to bad, then neutral, then okay, then good, before you can get to excellent. Also, to be fair, sometimes the step from neutral to okay leads back to bad, but that just means you must take another step.
Choices are like that. They’re often imperfect. But actively, mindfully choosing empowers you, and that puts you in what limited control of your life is available to you.
Circumstances are never set in stone
Change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Like it or not, change can, will, and does occur. It’s happening all around us, all the time, in and out of our control.
For that reason, circumstances are never set in stone. With one exception. Death. When you’re dead, you cannot change your circumstances. Harsh? Maybe, but it’s the unvarnished, unavoidable truth of life, the universe, and everything.
Yes, yes, you can argue that maybe there’s an afterlife of some sort, and also that we’re all energy and that death is merely transmutation from this form to another. Still, in death, all circumstances of life as you know it, here and now, are done. Set in stone. Sorry.
However, since you’re reading this, you’re here. Alive. Living right now. Thus, no circumstances are utterly unchangeable. Difficult to change, sure. Require time, energy, ideas, and work? Almost definitely. And maybe you can’t change your circumstances from unideal to ideal instantly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make choices.
The friend I mentioned earlier? They spend money on escapes from their lousy life circumstances. I know that’s good for them, but when I point out that they could alter their spending and redirect it toward changing their circumstances? I get that slight acknowledgement, but know they’ll just accept their circumstances as they are and continue to choose not to choose and remain disempowered.
Taking the time and effort to make choices and decisions to change is hard. And because there are no guarantees, you might not see improvement. Sure, you might even make things worse. But if you make no choices or decisions, the only changes you’ll get in your circumstances are random and probably utterly outside of your control. That’s what happens when you’re disempowered.
Recognize, acknowledge, then make choices and decisions
There is a constant, ongoing search for the pill that fixes everything. A pill to take away your excess weight and make you happy because of that. Another pill to turn you into a money machine. Still another pill to fix this, that, or the other thing with little to no effort.
Truth: There is no magic pill. Take the latest rage in diets – GLP-1s. Yes, by themselves, they can and will curb your appetite and thus help you lose some weight. For a time. Without fundamental changes to your nutritional intake and exercise, they’ll hit a limit or stop being effective.
Circumstances change because change is the one and only constant. However, you can have a hand in altering and changing them via active conscious awareness and mindfully making choices and decisions for your life. Even the smallest mindful decision exercises the muscle you need to empower yourself.
Recognize your current circumstances. All aspects of them, good, bad, and in-between. Then, acknowledge them. Failure to acknowledge disempowers because it’s akin to knowing someone is beside you but turning away and ignoring them in the hope they’ll go away. Recognition must be paired with an acknowledgement of circumstances.
Once you recognize and acknowledge, now you can make choices and decisions to alter and change your circumstances. Even the smallest act of actively choosing and deciding empowers you. It puts you in the driver’s seat of your life experience.
One caveat: Please understand, you can only make changes to YOUR circumstances. You can open and hold doors, but you can’t make anyone walk through them. Step through your own doors via your choices and decisions, and maybe people will see how you’re empowered and follow you through.
Choosing and deciding not to accept your circumstances isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge your circumstances, you open yourself to making consciously aware, mindful choices and decisions to change them. Knowing that you can take even small steps to make choices and decisions that are for you and your life experience, you can act on that to change your circumstances – even a little bit – to gain more strength, which makes further active choices and decisions easier.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirtieth (630) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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