You know, when we’re first getting started in making changes in our lives to find ways to live better, there’s a whole world of carrots and sticks that we can hold up to encourage us to make the change.
Because that’s the biggest and hardest point of the change, is the very beginning.
How do we start to move down a good path? How do we take the very first step? And I think of it like turning a wheel, like getting a wheel moving.
Once that wheel is turning, it has some momentum, and it can continue to go.
But when that wheel has been fixed, solidified, almost petrified, into stone, that wheel is going to be very difficult to move.
So you can really go through every trick in the book to get that wheel moving, to get change started.
There’s the whole arsenal of little tricks to encourage us, to trigger us to change mindset.
The carrots of all the life that we want to live.
The stick of where we can imagine our lives going if we don’t make changes.
So we build up this whole system of tricks.
But after a while, the tricks only work for so long, and even calling them tricks, I mean, once they’ve kind of played out as tricks, they’ve had their day, now they’re predictable.
The next time we feel discouraged, they don’t have the same strength.
So I am going to talk a lot in the future here, I’m going to talk a lot about these tricks.
I love these tricks.
I love the toolbox of ways to shift our mindset in any possible way.
Sometimes it needs shock treatment, and sometimes it just means throwing everything at it, every possible way that we can shake ourselves out of our conditioned mindsets that are holding us back.
But after a while, those tricks expire.
And without those tricks, we’re really just left in the open, to be in a place that can be very difficult.
The place where there’s no comfort, there’s no solid answer there’s no easy or clear way.
And we can look at our lives and see, yeah, things are much improved, and so much better than they could have been had I not taken steps to change things.
And yet, life will always be difficult.
Life will always be unclear.
It will be frustrating, inconvenient, uncomfortable, challenging, painful.
Those things don’t go away, no matter how much self-improvement, no matter how much self-development, changing mindset, all the work that we do.
It doesn’t fix our lives in that ultimate sense.
Being alive is still always going to be this very messy, difficult business.
There is no fix.
There is no final point.
There is no cure for life.
Except death itself, if that can be called a cure.
So there’s- my my thought is not to say that it’s not worth it, because we only have to compare what our lives could be if we did not do personal work, self-improvement and mindset work.
Our lives- I feel my life would be so much worse.
The path that I moved away from would have taken me far down.
So I have no doubt that this work is bringing me closer to meaningful life.
But some days, like today, it just really hits me that life is not something to be fixed.
This challenge is here all the way through.
And it seems like our only choice, our path is to find a mindset that embraces that challenge.
Not seeking a fix, a solution, or a cure, but finding a mindset that can be a part of this life, this experience, in all that it is, not try to make it something else, and be okay, and simply say, “This is life.”