Got a comment to my last video, about starting a change in life, that it depends on how much free will a person has, and the sense of being able to control their own lives.
So this is a big topic: the idea of having will, having will to change our lives, our world, our existence, our surroundings, ourselves, and the ability to make changes, the ability to feel like you can make a change.
And this is not an automatic thing, of course.
And I think it’s important to separate two parts of the equation.
Because it’s difficult to know how to change, but it’s a separate matter to know that it is possible to change.
So when I realized that my life was not in the position I wanted it to be, I did not have a road map, a plan, on how to improve it.
I just had a sense that I was not living life the way I could and should in order to get the most out of life.
I was not using my chance to be alive to the fullest that I could.
And as I saw time passing by, I realized I could not simply wait until some undetermined future point when I can just start living my life right later.
I had to do it soon, before too much extra time had passed.
So I had to- so I decided that my life my life could be improved, that I could be doing something better, I could be in a better place.
Not only in this abstract, hypothetical way, that, oh, I can imagine living a better life, but actually that I can see that there is room for me to make changes so that I can live a better life.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know how.
But I believe that it all starts with believing that it is possible.
Simply believing that I could be living life differently, I could be living life better than I am now, and any of the reasons that might say that it’s not possible are not, in fact, valid.
If I say, you know, I’m too old to make changes in my life: no.
That’s not valid at any age.
I’m not able to change myself: I could say I have no ability to change myself, I have no control over myself.
And yet, we do change over time.
People will change over time, no matter what.
And so I know it is possible for me to change.
Even if I don’t know it’s possible for me to precisely control how I’m gonna change, I know that I will change.
And so, perhaps even if I have almost no self-control at all, I might be able to slightly adjust the way that I’m changing.
So it only takes a little bit.
I mean, you could run down the other list of reasons why it’s not possible.
Oh, you know, I’m no good.
I don’t have the ability to live better.
I’m not worth the trouble.
Or whatever the way.
I’d be curious to collect even more of a list of these kind of what I might call excuses, reasons for- reasons that hold us back from being able to make change and to be able to do what we want.
The feeling that it’s just not possible, not worth it, and just forget about it.
But when I was in a darker state of mind and a less healthy state of mind, I would get these occasional hints.
It was almost like light shining through a window, where I just get this hint of, oh, that’s how some other people are living their lives, and that’s how I could imagine my life could be more in that direction.
And it just gave me that slight hint of, oh, I can see where there’s a possible change to be made, that I could be different.
How to actually make my life that way: there, I had nothing.
Because I could say, well, you know, I’m too old, I can’t start again and do things right, so there’s no way I can ever match somebody else’s position that they’re in.
I can’t have another life.
I have to live with my life.
I don’t know what I can do.
But the idea that I’m thinking about today is just that I don’t really need to know exactly how to change my life.
That’s not the first thing that I need.
I need to believe that it is possible.
Just simply that it’s possible for my life to change and to become closer to what I want.
That this is possible.
Once I believe that, I am already making the first step.
Step into this possibility that, okay, I am gonna make some changes.
I don’t know exactly what yet, but I know it’s possible to change and improve.
And then, as time moves on from then, I started to notice different little things that I could do.
And I continued studying and practicing, just little things here and there, very slowly, up and down, forwards and backwards, but finding little things that I could start to do to start bending the direction of my life, even in a very small way.
And the whole idea of willpower is a whole other topic, but by applying a very slight change, we already bend the course of our life.
So even the smallest changes will start to add up over time.
And these little changes don’t have to be all planned ahead as one big program of change.
We don’t have to have an end goal clearly in sight. […]