We all have these inner thoughts…. “I should do better, be better, have a better attitude, treat people better, control my emotions better, take better care of myself, lose weight, stop smoking/drinking, be a better parent”…. whatever it is.
No matter how good we are, sometimes our inner most thoughts always return to how we can do better. Sometimes, even though we have those thoughts, in the moment that we are doing something that opposes those very principles, we don’t always make the best choice. We make excuses, we say “I’ll do better tomorrow, next week, etc”. But do we follow through?
What stops us? What keeps us from doing better for ourselves? Fear? Fear of change. Laziness? It takes too much effort. Denial? It will change on its own.
No! I decide! We decide!
There are very few things that we can decide for ourselves. We can’t decide how people will treat us today. We can’t decide if we will live or die today. We can’t decide what the world will put upon us today. But we CAN decide what we put upon ourselves.
Two very basic things…
1. What we project into our lives.
2. What we put upon our bodies.
What we project into our lives.
We all wake up everyday with a chance to make a “brand new start”. We have the opportunity to make today great, mediocre or inferior. Our circumstances don’t determine our likelihood of any of these. Plenty of poor and sick people are happy, plenty of successful people are sad and depressed. It’s what we decide that emanates into our lives. What we make of our circumstances.
We wake up and decide to compare our reality to our ideal. We decide to accept our current situation, and either become inhibited by it or motivated to improve upon it.
We aren’t defined by our circumstance, but by how we choose to view it. When life gives us challenges we can decide to deal with them rationally, or irrationally. When someone is rude or insensitive to us we can decide to take offense to it or accept their indifference. When things don’t go our way, we can decide to recoil or transform. We decide.
I can’t tell you how many times I have wished I was skinnier. I project upon myself the image of beauty that I desire and demand of my body something it’s not capable of because I haven’t been willing to put in the work to achieve it.
Which brings me to the second thing we control.
What we put upon our body….. For me, I have several flaws in this category. I probably drink too much, I weigh too much, and I vape too much…. what i though was a solution to smoking but in reality is just a “less stinky” way to smoke without anyone noticing. But on a daily basis, I choose to embrace these things. I decide.
We control everything that we eat, drink and inflict upon ourselves.
Aside from medical conditions, WE are the only thing capable of inflicting pain or pleasure unto ourselves. So you have to ask yourself, am I okay with what I’m doing to myself, or should I decide to change?
While I realize that things like alcohol, drugs, nicotine and food are all triggers that posses a strange and innate ability to control us, I also realize that at the moment of consumption we have a chance to decide…. is this something I should be doing?
For some with the IDGAF attitude, power to ya sister, do your thang! For people like me, I defy rationality and replace it with “it’s okay, I’ll do better next time”. And I do the bad thing anyway. Screw the consequence, I just want the satisfaction.
But on the verge of turning 38, just a year from raising a teenager, realizing that my IDGAF decisions will effect my future and also the future of someone I love, I have to ask myself….. how can I choose better?
With all the things in this world that I can’t control that could take me away from him… why am I choosing to perpetuate things that could? With life being so short, why am I validating things that could make it even shorter? How can I do better?
So today I’m saying I will do better, choose better. I will decide what to do with my life based on how the consequence of my bad decisions will perpetuate my future.
I decide. What will you decide?
Is today the day that you decide to do something different?
Great Imperfections 