What Are You Doing with Your One Life Experience?
We all get one life experience each in these bodies. What are you doing with yours?
Like it or not – we have a finite time in this existence.
The finite meat popsicles we call our bodies are the vessels that house our infinite souls. The substance may be eternal – but the vessels are not.
Are we here just for basic subsistence? Or is there more to this life experience than that?
I believe that we’re here for more than just survival and subsistence. I believe we’re here to get as much out of this life experience as we can.
That’s not always easy. And we all have bad days. And sometimes, we are reminded of our mortality in numerous, unpleasant ways.
But we all have a choice. Focus on the negative and all that can possibly go wrong, fail, or be fucked up. Or focus on the positive and all that can possibly go right, succeed, or be fucking incredible.
And when we can’t see one side or the other of this flexible cylinder clearly – we can choose what direction to look towards, at least.
Whatever it is – no matter how much it doesn’t look or feel this way – we always have a choice. And that applies to almost every aspect of how we approach our life experiences.
Every day matters
It’s fair to say that everyone has bad days.
Some are utterly circumstantial. Others are our own fault – or a combination of error and circumstance. Some of these are just unpleasant and annoying while others are truly awful and deeply emotional.
Even when we have a truly horrific day – we choose to carry it to the next day or to work on letting it go and releasing it. And while that might take some time for one reason or another – we can still choose to work with that.
It’s easy to have one bad day spiral into a terrible week. Or worse. But most of the time – in my experience, at least – the spiral can be stopped at any time so long as we take action to end it.
How that will look is going to be situationally dependent. What stops one spiral won’t impact another at all. But the effect is going to be the same – we’re empowered to work at it.
What has this got to do with the question – what will you do with your one life experience? Everything.
Every. Single. Day. Is. New. No matter how similar, each and every day is unique in various ways. That’s a result of the only constant in the whole universe – change.
Recognizing and acknowledging this is how we each can choose how we experience everything that happens.
Even a bad life experience has good in it
When bad things happen – they can still do us good.
Getting hit by a car crossing a street and having multiple, severely broken bones is not good. Multiple surgeries to repair the damage are painful and unpleasant. Physical therapy is all about pushing pain limits to expand them. Nerve damage is unpredictable and recovery from it infuriating.
I went through this. First-hand, I can definitively explain that this sucked. To all intents and purposes, I gave a year of my life to all the work that went into recovery.
And I would not be who I am today had this not happened to me. Bad as it was – it made me a better person.
The pain sucked. The scars are not pretty. Having a clavicle made of titanium is odd. But bad as this was – it taught me invaluable lessons I still am learning over 20 years later.
I’ve lost people I cared about. Relationships have crumbled. Friends left. Other shit happened in my life. But for all that bad – I choose to take the lesson and see how what I am doing with my life experience matters most.
And – much as I wish there were more I could do – I can’t change anything for anyone else.
My life experience cannot fix the world
I look at what’s going on in the world around me. The war in Ukraine, hate impacting transgendered kids and families around the country, greedy businesses destroying the planet, and on and on.
And as much as I strive to help people and do good in this world – I can do little to nothing for these bigger issues.
I can boycott terrible businesses, vote in elections, donate to worthy causes, and support good leaders. And that’s about it when all is said and done.
That’s frustrating. Especially in the face of the constant bombardment of information about these world events.
But it comes down to this – the only life I can experience is mine. And even if people are going through awful things – feeling bad about it and not bothering to live my own life experience in the process is utterly counter-productive.
Don’t be a crab
Are you familiar with the crab effect? It’s a psychological phrase for the behavior where a selfish, jealous mindset of a group is used to undermine or stop the progress of anyone else in the group. In other words – I can’t improve my lot, so why in the hell should you?
Have you ever wondered what news media dominated by corporate interests mostly show us things to keep us feeling stuck and disempowered? I think the crab effect is a good explanation.
That’s why we need to recognize and acknowledge our empowerment. So that we can make active choices to take actions with the intent to have an interesting, worthwhile, amazing life experience.
This can feel selfish, self-centered, and otherwise wrong. In the face of crazy-bad world events, isn’t focusing on our life experience egotistical? To be honest – partially. But not in the way you probably think.
You are the only person in your head, heart, and soul. Only you can control how you think and feel. That’s not to say outside influences won’t impact you at times. But in the end – it’s up to you.
How does lamenting world awfulness, or focusing on people, places, and things you cannot control – and choosing to do nothing to get the most you can from your life experience – benefit anyone? It doesn’t. This is counterproductive.
This is why choosing to recognize and acknowledge that you alone can have this one life experience is how you start to really live. Merely survive – or thrive?
Finally – I would argue that empowered people thriving can help lift-up others. By example, by having resources to give, and by offering a beacon of reason and hope in a fear-based society.
Choosing to get the most from our one life experience isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
Choosing to work on really experiencing this singular life experience should be a no-brainer. Because unless you think we’re here to merely survive – living and experiencing life is our true purpose.
When we work with what we each have – this one life experience – we can make choices and decisions to be, have, and do more. Knowing this, we choose not to merely survive but to act for our own good to thrive and make the most out of our finite time in these bodies. That empowers me – and it can empower you, too. We can use this to stay more neutral subconsciously, while consciously choosing things leaning towards the positive end of life’s extremes.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast space that exists between them – I believe shifts the concept in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, we can explore and share where we are between those extremes and how that impacts us here and now.
Lastly, I believe the better aware we are of ourselves in the now, the more we can do to choose and decide how our life experience will be. If that empowers us, it can also open those around us to their own empowerment. And that is, to me, a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
This is the four hundred and twenty-fifth entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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