What happens when you’re an adult and you still have no clue what you are doing with your life? You are at a standstill. You have no vision, no goal, no clear path. All you know is that you are not happy and you want to be fullfilled. How do you avoid feeling like up until this point you have wasted your time? And not just time or even valuable time but your LIFE. How do you avoid feeling like you have wasted your life?
You look at people you know who are happy and content. For some people it’s genuine. I think for many, it is content with being unhappy. There is a difference between being truly happy and having happy moments. Can you ever be truly happy with every aspect of your life? Can you love your downtime, work, family, friends, and social life? Can you be satisfied with your physical appearance and be mentally stable? And on top of that be overall healthy? Do all of these things have to be top notch in order for someone to truly, really, genuinely be 100% happy? You could argue that it isn’t possible for all of that. Something inevitably goes wrong or falls short. So, the answer is, you need to be happy despite what isn’t perfect. It is no easy feat, but it is possible. Anything is possible.
Decisions are mandatory in life. You are making them everyday, all day. You decide to wake up, you decide to have coffee over tea, you decide to put gel in your hair, shave your legs(or not). You decide what to take for lunch, to order out for dinner, to finally get in bed before ten o’clock. You make decisions that consistently impact your day, your general mood, and your life. And you make them without actually knowing what the outcome will be, without even necessarily thinking of what it will be. However, you probably know what you want it to be. You have coffee, because it will help keep you more alert on your drive into work. But you get to work only to find you are jittery, and your heart is racing. Oh well! What are you going to do? Regret that you decided to have coffee? Beat yourself up over the fact that you didn’t think about the potential to feel over caffeinated? Question, why did I do that? Why didn’t I just have the tea? What was I thinking? This was such a horrible decision, no good has come out of it at all! No, chances are you don’t do any of those things. You don’t go back and try to analyze precisely what went into your decision of having coffee and what you thought would happen verses what did happen. There is a chance you don’t even associate your jitters with the coffee. You could go all day thinking you just felt weird. Either way, you go about your day, maybe drink a few extra glasses of water.
Yet, when you make more serious decisions in life and the outcome is not what you hoped for, you do exactly that. You dwell, you regret, you question. Nobody makes a decision because they think something bad might come of it. You are always making them because you think it is right, better, smarter. It might be the harder way but you still make the decision. You decide, in hopes that it was the right choice. You decide to move across the country for school or a new job. You might get there, not get into the school, or lose the job after a month. You might get there and realize the dream job isn’t so dreamy after all. In addition, you have a falling out with family, and get into a car accident. It would feel as though as soon as you got there, everything went wrong. And you would feel like you made the wrong decision. You would be right about one thing, and that would be that things turned out differently. But that doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. The jitters are from the coffee, but not from your decision to have the coffee.
When you make a decision, you make it with intention. When you make a decision, you have to commit. You commit to it, you stand behind it, you have faith in it. You have faith in yourself. It’s not a game show, you didn’t choose door number three and get slimed. But if it were, and you did, you would go home and wash it off. When things do not go the way you thought, you go with it. You change with it, you adjust. You make it what you want it. You don’t sulk over how everything sucks, this isn’t what you wanted, and now what are you going to do? Nothing is ever certain, we don’t have a way to see into the future or to know how things are going to turn out. But we make decisions despite that. We have to. We don’t avoid, we can’t go back and change anything. We have to look forward. Always look forward. And tomorrow you have half-caff.