There are different roads available to take in life. Each has a different amount of risk. You have to find out what is important to you and how much risk you can afford given your personality, financial situation, familial responsiblities etc. In life as an adult, you have responsiblities to yourself and those around you...so how do you find a way to be happy in your life and fulfill your duties and responsibilies as an adult, husband/wife, parent, (insert other descriptive words that define your identity here). Even with all the "identities" and responsiblities that you accumulate, it is still YOUR life and you are responsible for it.
Ask yourself "If I had 30 days to live, what would I be doing? Would it be different than what I am doing now? Am I happy with my life? Or am I somewhat or completely unhappy?
If you are unhappy and find you need to make a change, how do you do it? You have to be realistic. You have to tend to your responsibilities...family, children, future...you can't just be stupid about it.
A relative of mine was about to get married and had many responsibilities running his family business. His life and future was thrust upon him when his father died and he had to step up to the plate, learn as much as he could as quickly as possible and take the reigns...whether he wanted to or not, it didn't matter. What he wanted to do in his life didn't matter...he was now the head of the family and had business to tend to.
Now he was getting married and adding even more responsibilities to what he already had. He seemed to be drowning, getting lost under all the expectations that were being put upon him. So I asked him what he would do if he had 30 days to live. He rattled off a list of all the different places in the world that he wanted to visit. One of the great things about living in the time that we do is that it's possible to go anywhere in the world quite easily. Of course he can't just shirk all his responsiblities and become a vagabond and start travelling the world. Of course not! But what he could do is write down his list of places. Then each year, he can plan a one or two week vacation and visit one of the places on his list. This makes it possible for him to do something that is important for him to do during his lifetime and yet maintain all of his responsiblities and obligations during the rest of the year. He found a way to make his life one he could be happy living.
3 comments:
I sure procrastinated a long time on this whole martial arts thingy (you know, the crazy Brazilian jiu jitsu thing - jiu jitsu in BRAZIL?).
But better late than never. And I haven't had to burn any bridges to do it.
Although I DO admire Val, who wanders the earth like Caine (that's Caine from Kung Fu as cited in Pulp Fiction, not Caine from Abel in the Bible).
Hey, that's me! I'm Val! I'm admired! but that's not why I'm posting here.
I just wanted to say that building a life you can be happy with is a process. It took me a good year and a half of (mental, emotional, spiritual) preparation to be able to chuck it all and walk the earth.
Like anything else, I think that happiness is something you commit to bringing to yourself, and every day you do a little more. stretch yourself a little further. Then, when enough time has passed, you look back and realize you have created a completely different existence. That's what happened to me, at least.
Happiness is Ecstasy(X-stasy?). belee dat.
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