Why Bother Making Choices and Decisions To Live Your Life?
Because only you can – and it’s way bigger than you probably think it is.
I’ve been working to find, choose, and/or create my own path for nearly thirteen-and-a-half years. As I’ve explored what goes into this, I’ve shared all sorts of ideas, concepts, and tools that have helped me to become calmer, more centered, more balanced, and frankly happier in my life.
Over the course of this effort, the inescapable truth I come up against is this: Change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Sometimes slow and subtle, barely perceptible; other times, rapid, sudden, and drastic. No matter what, change is constant. And most of it is outside of your or my control.
There have been many ups and downs in this journey of self-discovery. For more than seven hundred weeks in a row, I’ve explored notions, concepts, ideas, and avenues for finding, choosing, creating, and ultimately walking paths I desire to experience.
Why do it at all? Because I believe that the meaning of life is this: TO LIVE. What does it mean TO LIVE? It means to do more than merely exist. It means you make choices, decisions, and actively seek out experiences to find potential and possibility. You do more than just survive; you learn, grow, and work to drive or ride change and thrive.
Let’s face it, there are exactly 3 truths of life nobody can escape. This applies to everyone, no matter their station, celebrity, obscurity, or what-have-you. These truths are:
- You’re born.
- You live.
- You die.
We have zero control or choice in being born. Likewise, we have nearly zero choice in dying. But living? That’s all on you. And you’re approach to that – positive or negative, excitement or trepidation – is yours to choose.
It all begins with you
You are the only you that there is. There is nobody but you inside your head, heart, or soul. Despite attempts by others, both blatant and subtle, to control you – you are ultimately the one driving you and your life.
This can often feel like complete and total bullshit. Circumstances, random happenstance, and numerous external variables will create obstacles you can choose to overcome – or – allow to distract and divert you. No matter who you are, you ultimately control your life experience.
To start asserting control of your life, you need to reach deep inside. Only by looking within can you see your subconscious aspects. Specifically, your beliefs, values, habits, and memories.
Since the subconscious is the place of automation via rote and routine, it needs to be accessed by conscious awareness. That’s where mindfulness comes in.
To engage your subconscious self with your conscious self, all you need to do is be grounded and actively aware in the present. From the here and now, to gain self-awareness, ask yourself:
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What do I intend here?
- Is my approach positive or negative?
- What am I doing?
All of these can only be asked and answered, genuinely, honestly, right here and now.
Self-awareness is literal. The knowledge of who, what, where, how, and why you are is based on knowing your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. Because once you know them, you can influence and assert control over them that only you can employ.
Empowerment and power via choices and decisions
The mysterious, hotly debated, frequently anonymous, and scattered “they” of the collective consciousness of the world prefer that you not find empowerment.
Why? Because empowered people need little more than guidance and inspiration to live. The “they” want to control you and make you act how “they” would prefer. Most of this is based on artifices of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency, coupled with consumerism to alleviate the non-existent pain of those.
Things are seldom what make life experiences memorable for good or ill. Experiences transcend the tangible/material. That’s not to say money and things don’t have a place, but they are not the end-all be-all of anything.
Any and all control you can take over your life experience comes from two places. Choices and decisions.
Faced with choices, many people prefer that someone else guide them. Even when you let another person choose something for you, you have chosen to cede your power and authority to them.
When it comes to making decisions, this is even more in your power. Deciding, from its linguistic roots, involves cutting something off. Hence, many decisions will tip any given scales in one way or another.
In the end, only you can make choices and decisions for you. When you are active in doing that, you’re finding, choosing, and/or creating your life experience. That’s your path.
Remember, however, that no matter what choices and decisions you make today, nothing is ever set in stone.
Choices and decisions are fluid
You will choose wrong. Mistakes will be made. Sometimes, you’ll totally fuck it all up. Congratulations, welcome to the Human Condition.
Perfection, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What’s perfect to you is utterly imperfect to me. Sometimes we’ll disagree on this. This is also where a lot of conflict comes in.
Most conflict is based on artifices and lies. The majority of those come from false claims of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency. The truth is that these are scare tactics intended to keep people small and dependent on the “chosen” few.
You can do little to nothing about this. The more you focus on what you have no control over, the more you cede your power. Seriously, it’s important to know what terrible people are doing to the world. That’s how you know who to boycott, what to protest, who to vote for, and so on. But making that the focus of your life is the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Distractions are everywhere. They tend to lead choices and decisions toward someone else’s goal. Mindfulness, active conscious awareness of yourself, empowers you to make choices and decisions to live your life as fully as possible.
Know this: Your choices and decisions are seldom solid and set in stone. Choices and decisions are fluid and can change in all sorts of ways.
When I started to write about this topic years ago, my focus was on thoughts, feelings, and actions. Then I came to include intentions. With further exploration, I also added approaches to my mindfulness toolkit.
This demonstrates the fluidity of intangibles. But even the material plane is always changing. For the most part, you control very little of the world outside of yourself.
Why bother?
So why bother making choices and decisions to live your life?
The only person in your head, heart, and soul, is you. Nobody other than you knows what drives you, what lights you up, brings you joy, and ultimately makes you tick.
Birth is not yours to control, and for the most part, neither is death. But the middle, the long part between the extremes, life? Life is lived only by you for you.
That’s why you bother to make choices and decisions. Because only you know what is best for you. That’s not to say you won’t employ guides, gurus, teachers, peers, and others to assist that process. But, ultimately, it’s entirely, wholly, wonderfully on you.
Yes, wonderfully. Why? Because no two people experience life the same way. And life is meant to be experienced. Yes, that means both highs and lows, shit and Shinola, sorrows and joys, and so on. The bad helps us see, desire, and understand the good, and is ultimately the truth of the yin and yang of the Universe.
To truly live life, to find, choose, and/or create any given path, starts when you look inside yourself and make choices and decisions for you and your life. That’s not selfish, it’s empowering. And more than that, it’s a superpower.
Why bother making choices and decisions to live your life? Because that’s how you take what control there is for you to take. That’s how you live your own adventure and experience all that this amazing, unique isness of you can experience.
It’s simultaneously ginormous and complex and small and simple. But it’s for you to choose and decide the shape of.
Do you see how choices and decisions you make ultimately empower you?
This is the seventh-hundred-first (701) 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 repost 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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