Before you mentally attack me, hear me out…
Everyone goes through shit. No matter who you are. No matter how good someone’s life may seem, they have a history. Their family has a history, they and their circumstances aren’t perfect and like you, they aren’t the same person they were one or five years ago. And I think everyone realises this (hopefully), but we forget…
But we make life difficult
I don’t know what it is about humans and the need to feel sorry for ourselves when for the majority, we have it pretty good. Allow me to elaborate – by good, I mean we don’t have to hunt for food to survive. Dig a hole to go to the toilet. Make a fire for light and warmth. Let’s face it, we are all privileged and whether you care to admit it or not, if you are reading this, you are rich. Richer than you think. And for every person you wish you could trade lives with, there’s a tonne looking at you in the same way.
An old quote by G. Michael Hopf seems to be thrown in my face quite a bit lately – “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” For the longest time, our ancestors had suffered, starved, scavenged and fought to get us to the civilisation we are in now. And after all the prehistoric years of problem solving, to thousands of years of invention and discovery, to now having the world and all the answers we want at our fingertips. We no longer need to just survive and we can quite comfortably, live life for our passions or in finding the meaning of life! We have gone from being master problem solvers to, in a time when we no longer have life threatening problems, creators of them.
How to make life easy
You want something, take it. You can’t have it, learn to get over it. Miss your friend, call them. Need to start that thing, start it. Have something to say, say it. Want to be better at something, work hard at it. Want to loose weight, be more active or eat less. It might not feel easy but just biting down and taking action is what makes it easy!
“Im not courages”, then be courageous. “I’m not bothered”, then be bothered. Just do it. Want to do it so badly that you give yourself no choice.
Easier said than done. What if it doesn’t go to plan? What if i’m wrong? What if they say no? That’s all kind of the point! Then you deal with it. Easy. That’s life, you won’t know until you try and if it doesn’t go your way, well welcome to where you and everyone has been multiple times in life and thats totally okay. Life isn’t always going to be rays of sunshine and that is the beauty of it!
There is beauty in imperfection
Life is beautiful because it is imperfect. I used to analyse and keep track of my days, trying to find and preserve the “perfect day”. I would go through the day thinking “yep, this is the day. Nothing bad has happened yet so this will be my good day.” Basically seeing how long it could last for until something inevitably would ruin it. Usually something insignificant, too. When in reality, I was just looking for something to ruin it. That’s not how life works and I realised that I will never get a perfect day if this was my mentality. You’re not supposed to have perfect days. And what kind of boring life would that be anyway. How unfulfilling and unmemorable of a novel or film without a few disruptions. And what is art if not a reflection of real life! Nothing major had changed in my life upon this epiphany except me. I grew and learnt to love the dents in my days. Learnt to see the bigger picture and love life no matter what it throws at me. Because at the end of the day, we don’t get to choose our circumstances, only how we navigate through them. Now I can’t even remember the last time I had a “bad day”. I have significant moments and chapters of my life but a day is just a small fraction of time. A mere page or two in my big life story.
It took a journey for me to embrace this but I wouldn’t go back in time or change a thing no matter how daunting or traumatic of an experience. Every action has a reaction. That’s how we learn, that’s what makes us the person we are. Forever changing, forever learning and growing. I personally have things I struggle to bring to light because of pain and embarrassment but I can guarantee that when im old and ugly, I will admit that none of it mattered. We can learn from older generations but alas, we must do what they did and the ones before them and learn for ourselves. None of this pointless stuff matters but hey, I guess it fills in the blanks. Not every day can be our main character’s rise to action!
We know the outcome. We know life goes on. The petty things won’t matter. That a mistake doesn’t change who we are completely. We know no matter how bad it gets, the good will always outweigh it.
If we can turn a good situation into a negative one, why can’t we turn a bad one into a positive just as easily? We have the power to create our fate. If we really do look at things from a bird’s eye perspective, can’t we just reason with ourselves, weigh up the possibilities and make the choice our future selves will favour more?
To this, I shrug my shoulders and call it a day
peace