A Matter of Perspective
Are you the one you’ve been waiting for?
Infuse your life with action. Don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth. ~ Bradley Whitford
I often think I am waiting for something or someone to come in and “rescue” me from a life of unplanned uncertainty. Waiting for my Knight in Shining Armor to come and break through the strongholds of a captivity that was often self-created.
But what if it is me that I have been waiting for? What if it is you that you have been waiting for?
The number one key to change is action. Without action, well, we just sit in a stagnant pool of self-pity and doubt. With action, we can at least drag ourselves a bit farther away from that pool inch by inch and day by day!
Inaction is the thing that makes us drown in that pool. Action, even a little bit, can change everything! We can breathe again. We can start to create and embrace the life we want for ourselves.
Challenges...
But what holds us back? For me, it is plain old fear.
You know FEAR:
Forget
Everything
And
Run!
I am often so fearful to take steps of faith, to just jump into the unknown without first dipping my big toe into it.
Because the unknown is BIG and scary! It might have teeth that shred dreams and leave lives in tatters.
I might get hurt. I might be alone. I might die! (Gasp)
And truthfully, all of those things are possibilities...
However...
I might not get hurt. I might flourish.
I might not be alone. I might be surrounded by people who wholly support me and believe in me.
I might not die. I might live!
The following is a quote I found that I fell in love with! It is rather long but it is a keeper!
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do, the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would’ve been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
~ Matt Haig
Wow! Right? Maybe it’s just me... But too often it’s often the “shoulda, woulda, couldas” that kill us. The regrets that form for lives we didn’t live, the friends we didn’t make, the leaps we didn’t take.
Maybe instead of waiting for the Knight in Shining Armor, I need to look at the me in the mirror and see that I am wearing the armor myself. You are wearing that armor, too!
Now let’s wield those swords and start cutting through the regrets and start living again!
Turns out, I was the one I was looking for all along!
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