How is Pathwalking a Challenge?
I have a lot on my mind right now, and choosing a topic has been an interesting challenge.
I have been presented with the opportunity to well and truly walk my path. This has put me in a position where I can work on setting the schedule I desire, make the use of my time I most want to. Further, this has afforded me a chance to work on building the destiny I most want from my life.
While I am working on this, however, I am still aware of the world around me. It is difficult sometimes to work on my own desires when I see what is happening out there.
While we can control our emotional state more readily than we usually acknowledge, it is still a challenge to do so. There are competing feelings along the way, some of which serve and some definitely do not.
The issue here is reconciling who I am, versus who I was, versus who I want to be. A great deal of this can be quantified with a more keen awareness of here-and-now. Yet that presents its own challenges.
How do I create the life I most desire without neglecting responsibilities, and while working to have a positive impact on the world around me? How do I change my mindset so that the bad feelings don’t overcome the good?
Challenges both personal and impersonal.
I have been effected by what is going on in the United States these past several months. A Congress which cares only for their special interests; a greedy, narcissistic, clearly unstable man-child holding the Presidency. Additionally, there are resurgent hate-groups rallying in public, threatening myself and my loved ones out of fear and anger. I am striving to not let this inundate me, but I cannot ignore it either.
Finding a happy-medium and striking a balance between needing to know what is going on and being overwhelmed with information about it all is challenging. Then, just to make it that much harder, living in a fear-based society where our media has to be scrutinized for bias and partisanship can be truly distressing.
Amidst all of that, I am working on creating the reality I most desire for myself. What I want to do is non-conventional. Thus it comes with a degree of guilt and even shame because I know so many people who believe this is not how it works.
How do I reconcile these seemingly opposed matters? That’s the question before me today, so please bear with me as I walk through it.
Challenge Accepted.
First and foremost, I think I need to consume less media. I want to be aware of what is going on out there, but I need to not drown myself in it. There is just so much information. Then there’s a metric ton of anger, fear, hate, loathing, deep concern, and all sorts of additional negative feelings attached to it. I’m already avoiding watching any news networks. I think I need to spend less time in my Twitter feed and online overall.
However, I still need and want to support those resisting this. I am pro-equality, in every single form that takes. A supporter of equal rights, pay, and equal treatment under the law, I need to continue to do all I can to show that support.
One critical aspect of this, however, boils down to my mental and emotional health. By walking my own path and creating the life I most desire, I am setting myself up to be more effective to those causes.
Mental health is an inside job.
In addition to our society being fear-based, we also are terrific at passing the buck, placing blame, and taking little to no accountability for anything. The message we are constantly presented with is that someone else is wrong, it is another’s fault, and so-and-so is blameless in ‘x’ matter.
This winds up getting applied to feelings as well. You made me feel angry; that made me feel bad; they hurt me; you made me feel unimportant and the like get tossed about too easily. Certainly other people and events can cause us to feel a certain way, but we are the only ones who can feel it.
We get to choose, when something makes us feel bad, how long to hold onto that. Do you want to wallow in it, or acknowledge it, react to it, then let it go? This is entirely within our individual power to affect.
As such, creating the life I most want to live will grow my positive feelings. I have spent a lot of time working at jobs where I was not capable of living up to my full potential for any number of reasons. I have spent a long time in that position because of a combination of choices, not choosing, and feelings of inadequacy or disillusionment or fear of success and failure.
Now I have reached the point in my life where I believe that I CAN have what I want, that I am able to do this thing which will ultimately make me happy, and financially secure, and stable.
Belief is the challenge.
Because I am facing conflicting emotions as I am beginning to walk my desired path, I am encountering difficulties in maintaining it. I set a schedule for my “perfect” weekday, setting aside time to work, to read, to exercise, to make this happen. Yet because I have some guilt about this, because it is unconventional, there is a slight undercurrent of doubt I am contending with. This is making it harder to manifest what I want, and to take this to the next level where I can make a living doing this.
What I am currently reading speaks a lot to interrupting patterns and changing the language applied to my thoughts. The greatest challenge I have right now is believing that I am capable of changing the message, creating the focus I need to feel the life I want to have into existence. I cannot ignore the feelings of doubt, but I can choose if I will let them dictate my actions, or if I can change them to something more productive.
What challenges are you working with today?
This is the two-hundred ninety-fifth entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for and my personal experiences with walking along the path of life. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
If you enjoy Pathwalking, you may also want to read my Five Easy Steps to Change the World for the Better.
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