The Simple Complexity of Life Boiled Down to One Word: Choice
I’m sure we can all think back to a point in our life where we were going through some sort of challenge or adversity and someone offered us some words of advice: no one ever said life was going to be easy. And if you are like me, you probably had a few choice words running through your mind that you would have loved to say back to them.
At the heart of it, they aren’t wrong. Nowhere is it written in stone that life was ever designed to be a cake walk. It’s a messy, complex, weird journey. But, the way I see it, life can be boiled down to one simple thing, choices. Life is all about the choices we make when we are presented with the events that occur in our environment.
If you think back to what you have done so far in your day I bet you can think of the choices you have made so far. What do I eat for breakfast, a donut or granola with yogurt? Someone cut me off in traffic, do I react by screaming and allowing birds to fly or do I take a deep breath and let it go? There are some choices and thoughts that we have that we can easily tune into. As life gets busy we often start taking shortcuts in our brain, and allowing our brain to go on auto-pilot which means we become blind to the choices our brain is making. This can be a helpful function when we simply just need to get simple tasks done, but if we fail to wake ourselves back up and turn this function off in our brain, it can start to lead to us making mistakes, or over experiencing certain emotions.
Knowing that life is all about choices doesn’t make it any easier; but, accepting that we have control and ownership over the way we navigate through the process can make it more manageable. Acceptance can allow us to view ourselves, our environment, and our choices in a non-judgmental way. This allows us to process different areas in a more objective manner, and allow ourselves more grace and empathy for not always living up to a perfect standard that our brain often tells us we must live by.
This is much easier said than done. Let me give you an example of this. As I sit here in the gym questioning why I would be here, super-setting weighted pull-ups with farmer carries I am struck with the simple complexity of life. Life is made up of choices—I can choose to sit here, piss and moan about how my forearms feel like they are going to explode, or I can make the choice to accept that this is going to hurt and be a challenge, but that’s how things go when you want to grow and become a better version of yourself. Neither choice physically makes the weight lighter, but one choice makes me more mentally prepared to handle the weight.
It doesn’t matter if it’s in the gym, at your work, or with your loved ones you have the opportunity to choose how you approach events that unfold. Life is a messy, hard, grueling journey, but you are still the one making the choices along the way. In the coming weeks I will be presenting some common events that happen within our lives, and examining how the choices we make impact our health, our relationships, and our effectiveness. So the question is, how are you choosing to pursue your journey?
-Daren