Live Your Life Fully, Don’t Let Your Life Live You
Some might see a broken-down old car above, but I see a happy piece of the past that looks to the future fondly and remains present today.
You know those feelings that arise when someone cuts you off on the highway? A sharp inhale then tightness in your chest, blood pressure rising, curses flying. What if you let those feelings go as quickly as they appeared?
In a scenario like the one above, I tell myself: maybe that person is about to have diarrhea. Sure, this might give the driver a little too much credit, but it's not about what I'm giving them, it's about what I'm allowing and refusing to allow for myself and how I'm choosing to conserve my energy, instead of spending it frivolously. It's making a conscious choice not to give something so draining and detrimental the power to reign supreme over me.
I also like to remind myself that every person is fighting an internal battle that I know nothing about. Because I don't know everyone's story, why they react the way they do. I don't know the depths of their inner turmoil, their lifelong traumas that lurk in the background noise of their mind every time they're in the presence of Funfetti cake or spiders.
From my experience, these are the differences between living your life fully and letting your life live you.
– Making conscious choices instead of having automatic reactions.
– Choosing the thoughts and energies you allow.
– Having compassion for yourself and others.
– Being present.
And it's not about trying to control your thoughts, it's about learning to stop letting your thoughts control you. It's taking your unconscious thoughts (the thoughts you think when you don't even realize you're thinking) out of the driver's seat and replacing knee-jerk reactions with conscious ones. Be deliberate. Be intentional. Choose the route, don't let the route choose you. I have these words, and others like them, written on post-it notes on my laptop, calendar, and mirror.
If you catch your mind caught in a loop of, "When will I be able to travel again? When will I be able to eat sushi in a restaurant again? But more importantly, when will I be able to travel again?" this might be a good place to direct your mental train down a different track. Or let's say you find yourself on the boredom track and you don't want to be there either, remember, you're the conductor, you can pull the lever anytime to change direction.
When a song comes on the radio that you don't like, change it. I mean that literally and figuratively. Sometimes I get a sad Christmas song stuck in my head, months from December, and rather than letting it bring me down, I change the station. I'll put on a song I love to hear instead, and just like that, the unwanted mental noise has disappeared (until the next bout surfaces).
It's not always easy. Detecting thoughts, sounds, and ideas we don't wish to have, takes practice. Choosing which thoughts to engage with and which to let float on by takes practice. And realizing that thoughts appear as spontaneously as the next sound you hear is a good reminder that you're not in control of the thoughts that appear, but you are in control of what you do with them. I.e., slamming the window shut to block out the screams of the lawnmowers, replacing that make-believe dialogue you've been stressing over with thoughts you like thinking, subbing that song you hate hearing with something you like listening to, and so on.
During these challenging times, we're all finding different ways to enjoy and sometimes simply survive. And sometimes it means eating an entire bag of Doritos when you're not even hungry, chain-smoking to ease the nerves, napping to pass the time. It's ok to cope how you cope, but these low-hanging-fruit options are quick fixes with short-term benefits. They're Bandaids and Chapstick. We can use this time for so much more. Learning new ways of coping that yield long-term benefits, like meditating. Use this time to write that book you've been dreaming about for years, pulling out the guitar you used to play, color-coordinating your closet...things you never would've had time for in the throws of life as we knew it. I know, in a lot of ways, it's rough, what we're going through, and we wish it would end, but what if we flipped our perspective on what this time is?
"Stress happens when the mind resists what is." Isn't this so true, especially of our current reality? The moment you stop worrying about the future or longing for the past and just enjoy where you are in the present moment, it's enjoyable, freeing, beautiful. We may never get another time like this in our lives. And on many levels, hopefully not, but it reminds me of when I had to move back home after living on my own for a few years in New York, NY – land of my dreams since birth. The thought of my wings being clipped sickened me. The reality of going back to "square one" wore me way down. And similar to what I'm saying to you right now, my dad told me something that I really didn't want to hear, and couldn't fully grasp at the time. It was something to the effect of, "I know it's not where you want to be right now, but it's kind of a good situation you're in. So try to take full advantage of it because you may never have another opportunity like this again." Spoiled and unhappy me, at the time, thought, man, I hope not. But even then, some part of me knew he was right. I learned to shift my perspective on myself and my situation and found acceptance and appreciation. And as I did, I struggled less. My life had more ease.
A shift in perspective can turn a partly cloudy day into a partly sunny one. Or a quarantine-lockdown situation into a retreat for learning, growing, imagining, tackling projects that have been on your list for a while, getting back in touch with hobbies, people, parts of yourself.
If you find ways to take advantage of this forced downtime, mentalities, activities...anything that makes life a little more enjoyable, please let me know how you're doing it. I'd really love to hear about it.