You Can Always Take Back the Wheel on Your Life Path
Who’s driving this life anyway?
It’s all too easy to get distracted and unwittingly allow outside influences to take the wheel and do the driving.
Much of this is due to modern society’s near obsession with automation, ease, instant gratification, and the like. This obsession leads to doing more and more by rote, routine, and habit. So much so that even personal matters take that form, too.
Rote, routine, and habit aren’t part of the conscious human mind, but rather the subconscious mind. When that’s how you tend to operate, you can easily fall into patterns and flows that might not be the paths you’d choose for yourself.
What’s more, society often prefers it that way. On the one hand, we reward and revere successful entrepreneurs (no matter if they’re genuine successes or fakes, and no matter if they do good for the world or are driven by money, power, and the like). Then, on the other hand, we warn the burgeoning artist or entrepreneur in our close circles to be reasonable, consider security, and that acting outside the norm is something to be feared.
Is it any wonder we have a mental health crisis? It never ceases to amaze me that more people aren’t schizophrenic. When you are being told in one breath that sex is dirty and shameful while being sold sex with nearly everything you can consume, that’s easily overwhelming.
Yes, some things cause us obligations and necessary duties that are unavoidable. As a parent, you have obligations to your kids. As an employee, you have work duties. When you’re a student you have assignments you must complete. These are just a few examples.
Yet you can always take back the wheel at any time on your personal life path.
Pathwalking and your life path
I started to explore and share my life philosophy, Pathwalking, in 2012. Over time, it has changed, evolved, and shifted in various ways. Given that change is the one and only constant in the Universe, this should come as no surprise.
What is Pathwalking? Pathwalking is using active conscious awareness – mindfulness – to make active rather than passive choices and decisions. Ultimately, it’s the core of the idea of conscious reality creation.
Consciousness creates reality. What that means, to me, is what you give your energy and attention to makes your reality.
Your reality, it should be noted, is wholly unique to you. While there are shared elements we all call reality – the sun, moon, stars, sky, and such – perception of reality is unique to everyone. Yes, that means there are 8 billion separate perceptions of reality in the world. As Einstein said,
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
What that means is that you have the power to choose how you perceive the reality of your life experience. While that does connect to the collective consciousness, perception of it on your mental, emotional, and spiritual level is wildly variable.
This is why everyone is ultimately capable of choosing their own life path. That means that if you’ve been living subconsciously by rote, routine, and habit, you can take back the wheel on your life path at any time.
Take back the wheel on your life path
What does it mean to take or take back the wheel on your life path?
It means that you use active conscious awareness – mindfulness – to gain insight into yourself. That insight opens the way to taking control of your thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, and approach to life.
From there, you now gain the ability to make choices and decisions to be who, what, where, how, and why you most desire to be.
Living subconsciously and allowing rote, routine, and habit to drive your life puts you in the passenger seat or maybe even the backseat. That’s because living subconsciously is passive and yields control. To be fair, there are times this is perfectly helpful and good for you. The trouble comes when you allow it to be your way all or most of the time.
This manifests as distress, discontent, discordance, and a feeling of being lost and/or out of control. It might be slight and subtle, blunt and abrupt, or anything in between. In its most extreme forms, it can manifest as depression, anxiety, and other mental, emotional, and/or spiritual issues.
Taking back the wheel on your life path is you being actively, consciously aware and choosing and deciding what you are doing, being, having, and so on. The first step to doing so is by practicing mindfulness.
This part is easy. To become actively consciously aware, all you need to do is ask questions like,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What am I intending?
- Am I taking a positive, negative, or neutral approach to things?
- What am I doing or not doing?
Each of the above questions can only be answered in the now. The present. That makes you actively consciously aware. You thus take the wheel.
Obstacles will still appear
It’s important to note that very few paths are perfectly straight, are roads without obstacles and ongoing construction, and that the unexpected will occur.
That’s because you can only take the wheel for your life. You have no control whatsoever over other people, places, or things. Anything or anyone outside of yourself can’t be controlled by you. No matter how much influence you might or might not have, you have no control.
Some people demand complete and utter control of everything. That, however, is impossible. You can’t, don’t, and never will control it all. That’s because outside of your own head, heart, and soul, you have no further control.
Accepting this is not disempowering. It’s empowering. Why? Because when you accept this, you can work to make choices and decisions for yourself so that you can take the wheel and drive your chosen life path.
Even when you surrender the wheel to drive your life to your subconscious, you can always take back the wheel on your life path. No matter the obstacles and challenges you encounter along the way, your life belongs to you.
There is an important exception to address.
Choosing to let the Universe take the wheel
No matter what choices or decisions you make in your life, there will be a time when you have to have faith. This has nothing to do with God or religion or any Powers That Be. This is faith that the choices and decisions that you’ve made are done and underway.
At that point, you need to let go of the wheel, trust that the autopilot is engaged, and allow what will happen to happen. This can be an especially squirrelly time in your brain because that lack of control is not due to relinquishing mindfulness, but rather to surrendering to allow the unseen to be made manifest.
That’s why you can always take back the wheel on your life path. There are times when practicing active conscious awareness means staying in the car on the path but allowing the unseen to do the driving.
What’s the difference between this sort of allowing and living subconsciously? Active choices and decisions versus passively not choosing or deciding and just letting life live you. It’s a part of being an active conscious creator rather than a passive observer.
You are empowered to make choices and decisions for conscious reality creation. It’s not easy, but it’s utterly worthwhile, satisfying, and enlightening.
You can always take back the wheel to make choices and decisions to live life rather than just go with whatever you’re presented with and allow life to live you. Nobody but you can do that. You have all the tools you need, you just get to choose to use them or not.
Will you take or take back the wheel when it comes to choosing and driving your life paths with this information?
This is the six-hundred and thirty-fourth (634) 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 Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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