What Are the Three Ways to Live Life and How Do They Work?
Life is a unique challenge for everyone
How we all live is a choice. We can make it as often or seldom as we desire.
In my experience, I’ve come to recognize 3 ways to live. There are variations, and each of these will be shifted around – but they’re inescapable.
· Let life live you
· Curl up in a ball and await death.
· Take the wheel, drive life, and go for a ride
The three ways to live life
· Let life live you. Rote, routine, subconscious living. You just go with the flow and let the routines carry you. General existence. This is largely neutral.
What does that mean? It means that people who let life live them go through the motions, go about a daily routine, and seldom make any choices that might rock the boat much.
Letting life live you involves falling into routines and making little to no effort to leave them.
· Curl up in a ball and await death. Despair, depression, half-conscious living. You tend to see all as dark and dismal and suffer. Expectation of death and despair, literally and metaphorically. This is largely negative.
This can be literal, or not, but I think we all know someone who appears to live life in this manner.
People who curl up in a ball and await death tend to complain about everything. They are miserable.
Many of the people who fall into this category are frequent victims.
· Take the wheel, drive life, and go for a ride. Conscious awareness, mindful living. You make choices and decisions and direct your routines. Seek to work with potential and possibilities. This is largely positive.
In choosing to live life in this way, we work to be in the here-and-now, explore the awareness of our thoughts, recognize the feelings we feel, and take intentional actions. We decide who we want to be, what we want to do, and how we can manifest it into being.
How you live life will shift and change along the way
There are circumstances we encounter that will, at least temporarily, take control out of our hands. Losing jobs, deaths, break-ups, and other situations involving other people and circumstances will impact us. This will shift how we live life.
Since the only things that we can control are our thoughts, feelings, and actions, we get to choose how long these situations will impact us.
There is a catch to this – but it’s an utterly false narrative.
The catch is that when you choose this, some will call you selfish. People will think because you’re living more mindfully, you’re being selfish, and not a productive part of society or doing what’s expected of you.
But this is a false narrative. Why? Because who but you is living in your body, your head, heart, and soul? Only you. And if you desire to control your life experience at all, the only thing you can control is how you choose to live in the motion of day-to-day life.
This week’s Applied Guidance for Mindfulness Tool:
At the end of the day, before you go to bed. Take 2-5 minutes to do the following:
1. Take 3 deep breaths in and let them out slowly to focus yourself.
2. What did you do today by rote and routine? Write it out - big or small, nothing is insignificant.
3. Write down what choices and decisions you made today. Large or small, write them out.
4. Were there opportunities or situations where you didn’t make a decision or choice – but could have? Write that down.
5. Look at what you wrote. Would you say life lived you, you spent the day awaiting death, or you drove life for the majority of the day?
Odds are, you did a little of both letting life live you and driving life. Hopefully, you didn’t spend the day miserable. But if you did – write down what you can maybe do tomorrow to have a better day.
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