Read This When You Feel Like Giving Up
On the days that you feel like giving up, remember why you started in the first place. Find a reason you set out what you set out and see it with clarity.
Am I where I want to be heading?
Is this for my highest good?
Am I happy? Meaning: how often am I not happy?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves when we are faced with struggles and difficulties in our lives. Each journey is different, and we’re all on the same highway anyway, but this life goes on and will do so long after we have fled to Mars and conquered the solar system.
The situations you face in your life, be they big or small, continuously shape your reality. Though we live in complexity, meaning there is so much orchestration beyond our control at play, we do have the gift and the will to choose. Every day until we’ve all kicked the damn bucket, we have the freedom to choose.
Choose the life of our parents or the generations before us. Choose a life of meaning and push against the boundaries of society. Choose the life of addiction and sorrow and grieving. Or choose a life of freedom and fulfillment.
Our superpowers are not just kindness and compassion but also strength and courage to make decisions and choose how we react to the curveballs of life. Life would be meaningless without the ability to choose who we are and what we want to be in the future. We are not just simple cogs in the machine of life—we are more than that.
We are the creators and curators of our lives and the happiness that comes from choosing a life of meaning.
The meaning will be different for each of us, but we all can agree that a meaningful life is a life worth living.
When the wind of change comes knocking on our door, we have the power of will to choose how we greet it. When I was in high school, my friend’s dad passed away while our class was writing our final exams. That day there was an awful silence that filled the exam hall. Naturally, we thought my friend would leave the study hall and not finish the essay, but to our surprise, she quietly finished her paper, handed it in, and left.
I later asked her why she even bothered finishing the exam as they would have excused her. She quietly replied, “I wrote that paper for my father. nNothing on earth could have brought him back, and that paper gave me a moment to focus on making him proud and not the fact that he had passed.”
She made the bravest decision that day—to not let grief consume her and instead push forward with determination. We will never be able to escape the tragedies of life, but we can break the illusion and the fear that grip us down and keep us stuck.
Living a life of fear is living a life wasted away by anxiety. We are on this plane to live our lives to the fullest, even through all the upheavals. Aristotle famously said we are what we repeatedly do, hence excellence is not an act but a habit. If you choose each and every day to keep going and keep your spirit lifted it will become an integrated part of your being.
You are not stuck, you are not trapped, and you most certainly are not moving backwards. Hurl yourself into the storms of life and keep pushing forward!