Your Path Will Challenge You
Walking your own path in life is not selfish.
You alone live inside your head, heart, and soul. Only you can think what you think, feel what and how you feel, and act or not on your intentions. You get to decide and choose if you take a positive or negative approach to life at any given time.
Nothing that you do is written in stone. Everything about who, what, where, how, and why you are is changeable. Changing might be a challenge, however, depending on numerous circumstances (many of which might be utterly outside of your control).
The idea of Pathwalking is living life in the present, actively making choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are. So many people in the world accept less than they deserve, allow themselves to be victims of circumstance, and are too caught up in making impressions on others to choose their own path in life.
Society has made it so that you can live almost entirely by rote and routine. Be a cog in the machine and do most of it automatically. I suppose for some people this works perfectly well. For others, however, it causes stress. That’s because this runs counter to their desires. If you seek to choose and walk your own path in life, rote and routine will become stressful and unsatisfying.
When you choose your path or change your path, know that it will challenge you.
The subconscious and the conscious mind
The subconscious mind is where your values, beliefs, habits, and memories live. What’s more, the subconscious mind doesn’t think actively, it stores things just like a hard drive. Like a hard drive, everything in your subconscious mind can be accessed and rewritten, overwritten, and replaced.
When you live by rote, routine, and habit, you’re allowing the old data in your subconscious mind to drive your life. This can be perfectly fine for some people. For others, however, this can cause depression, anxiety, uncertainty, and fights with fear.
Why? Because values, beliefs, and habits are not written in stone. Life experiences, learned things, conscious awareness, new environments, and other matters will impact them. What they mean to you will change, forcing you to make a choice.
When that choice catches you unaware, this can be massively disconcerting. Where did that come from? What’s going on? Why is this happening? Other questions of this nature pop up. This is particularly true if you’ve been living via rote, routine, and habit mostly subconsciously.
To choose any given path requires that you work from the here and now consciously. Applied conscious awareness is mindfulness. Mindfulness, in this context, is about what’s within you – not the world outside of you.
To access your active conscious awareness, you need to become aware of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what your intentions are, if your approach to life is positive or negative, and what actions you are or aren’t taking.
Only by being consciously aware, and mindful here and now, can you choose a path for yourself. This will not be without its challenges, however.
Your path will challenge you
Change is the one and only constant in the universe. Sometimes it’s instantaneous, other times imperceptibly slow. Even when this is related to unexpected happenstance, you have choices and decisions available to you.
You’re surrounded by the opinions of others. Some are passive, some active, some aggressive, some are a blend of smart and idiotic, and everything in between. Between TV, advertising, the internet, social media, smartphones, and overall connectivity 24/7, it’s almost impossible not to be inundated and overwhelmed by it.
Unless you make choices and decisions not to be.
Choosing your own path in life will spark the opinions of others. Especially if that path is nontraditional, unique, or full of uncertainty. Some of the opinions this will get you are “well-meaning”, presented as a “devil’s advocate” or “for your own good”, to show you why maybe you should abandon that path for something more conventional.
Some opinions are malicious. They dislike that you’re bucking the status quo, standing against their perceived norms, and being your truest, most genuine self. Fall in line or suffer the consequences, these suggest.
Your path itself will challenge you. That’s because to grow, change, evolve, and live fully requires you to leave your existing comfort zones. These are often not genuine comfort zones, because they’re more about familiarity and perceived (but not necessarily actual) stability.
While the path will challenge you, the result of walking it is a sense of being true to yourself, being strong, and acting on what you desire to live your life your way. When all is said and done, who else can know what that even is supposed to be?
This is one important elephant in the room to address.
Walking your own path in life is not selfish
I reiterate this point often. That’s because you’re bombarded by false, but sometimes half-true notions of what selfishness is.
Genuine selfishness involves taking for yourself and not giving a shit that you might take away from other people, cause hurt or harm, and leave others without. Selfishness involves malice of forethought. It’s having 10 people, 10 dollars, and rather than giving everyone a dollar, you take 3. Hence, you’re willingly depriving 3 people and forcing them to go without. This is what selfishness is.
If you worry about being perceived as selfish or feel bad because you’ve unintentionally caused hurt (like by setting boundaries or saying no to something), you’re not being selfish. How others perceive this is outside your control.
Only you know what’s best for you. Walking your own path in life is a challenge you choose. Nobody else can be aware of what’s in your head, heart, or soul. Hence, you alone know and can see, recognize, and choose the right path for you and your life.
Yes, your path will challenge you. Can you see how those challenges are part of your growth, evolution, and chosen life experiences?
This is the six-hundred fifty-fifth (655) 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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