Don’t forget that these are choices.
When you take a step back and see the world for what it is instead of what you’ve been desperately trying to make it, everything becomes much clearer. I’ve talked about it before–our lives being comprised of moments. Each of those moments come about because of our choices, and before those moments are allowed to be born, decisions are made. Our lives are our choices. Every single day, we influence the way we live at this moment in time and the far out future as well.
Stop looking at all of these choices as burdens and start seeing them as beautiful opportunities. I feel like a lot of the time we desire to blame something or someone else for our misfortunes, the terrible things that happen in our lives, maybe even the simply mundane things that we don’t want to do. However, everything that we have is a direct reflection of how we see the world and the decisions that we’ve made whilst living in it.
It’s easy to say that society forces me to go to school, stripping away job opportunities from me if I don’t. There are a lot of people out there who never got college degrees, however, and they are doing just fine on their own, making their way through life by consulting their own desires. I choose to go to school. I choose to learn and better myself every day. It would be foolish of me to stand up, hatefully announcing that school is useless and I want nothing more to do with it (albeit, there have been those nights where stress and anxiety took control of my voice). No, this is my choice. If your choice doesn’t match mine, I will still respect it because that’s what is so magical about this all. I could make a new decision and radically change my life tomorrow, if I really wanted to. But I don’t, and that is my choice. I can do whatever I please.
Right or wrong, my life is mine because my choices have manipulated, in some form or another, everything that has happened in it. I decide how I react to intense situations that are out of my control. I decide how much I exercise, how long I study for, and how healthy I eat. It’s my choice whether I stay in school and listen to my parents’ advice. I decide how I look at myself and how I treat other people.
This world is not against us. The majority of the time, we’re simply against ourselves and we’re too scared of admitting that. So we use other people, things, activities as scapegoats, throwing the blame onto them, making us feel better about ourselves for the time being. Making us feel like it’s not our faults that we’re not reaching our full potential. It’s a lie. We sit here thinking that life is going to wait for us. That the world will slow down and give us eternity to finally realize that the decisions we make today mean everything. I think a lot of us wait too long to try and make something of ourselves, believing opportunities are going to be served on a silver platter. I don’t want to look back in regret when I’m older.
The world doesn’t slow down. Time doesn’t stop. One day you’re going to be looking back on the person you are right now, incredibly upset that you wasted this time. You’re going to be pissed that you spent so much of your life hating yourself, not being appreciative, waiting for something to happen when really you had the power to change it yourself and never acted. When all you had to do was just make better choices for yourself. Nothing is going to happen magically. You have to do it all on your own, so don’t wait until the last minute to do so. Realize that you have the choice at this exact moment to better yourself or remain how you are for the rest of your life, always wondering what could have been.
Challenges are opportunity. Welcome them. Choose to live the life you’ve only ever dreamed about, and do it now.