Every day do something that scares you. Do something that challenges who you are, or you simply aren't living. I decided today that I am going to start living life as a journey. Not as a destination. This world and the dreams that we hold seem to twist as years go on. I have to admit that I have been living life with this firm goal/destination that haunts me, of which I have no idea what it is. One moment it's marriage and a family, the next a career, etc. Life isn't supposed to be lived with the anticipation of receiving an ultimate prize. Yet, I feel as though in today's society we are blessed with instant gratification. (Internet, cars, fast food, so forth and so on). Unfortunately, instant gratification brings impatience and misled feelings to the soul. I truly believe this.
So as my life continues with this "blessing" of instant gratification, I set my mind on a goal that shouldn't be a goal at all. You see, instead it should be a moment in my life or a part of my journey. Not the red ribbon at the end of the race. But because I am conditioned to think that an exciting thing that took a lot of effort to get is my final hoorah, I can't ever live on a journey. I simply hang around on an idea of destination. I cling to the potential not the actual accomplishing. The journey it took to get to my destination is what instant gratification teaches us is the most important part. We loose sight of our goals this way. We become wrapped up in the anticipation of gratification and forget to achieve.
Break it down like this. Forget any idea you ever had before and place yourself in the shoes of this thought.Your journey is now your life. Those "red ribbon" endings are now the milestones that you choose to let into your journey. Not only do you have a career, but you have anything else you once labeled as a destination. You're reducing the length of time to accomplish happiness, and you're increasing the amount of "destinations" you get to have in your life.
When you build something up and up sometimes it dissapoints you once you finally obtain it. I took a Pyschology class for a prerequisite a while back, and in that class we discussed how people set a level of expectation for themselves. Your inner desires and wants have to correspond with your actions. It isn't consistent 24/7 but eventually it will match up. So, say you set a grand expectation. You finally achieved that person you longed to be! But because of that "standard" we set on ourselves in our subconscious, if you go above that marker, we will not allow ourselves to stay above long. We will go back down to the original "high standard" we had once set before. Never alloting growth. Same goes with setting it to low. You set a low standard in your subconscious, and if you do anything at all, no matter how great, you will still bring yourself right back down to the lowest of lows. "Oh it's great that I got an A on my test, but I normally get C's, so I might as well go back to that". Sure, one would think that this is apart of self improvement. Setting a standard then moving it up as we continue to climb the success ladder. But how often have you tried to reinstate your subconscious with a different thought process? It's a task to say the least. Our subconscious records all of our thoughts, exactly as we thought it, not meant it, and applies it to the behaviors you are entitled to have as a human being. We need to remove this expectation of who we are, what we can be, what we desire. The burden and stress of living up to this one thing is removed. We have now opened our mind to the idea of anything we want. Not just what we have proved we are capable of.
We must push ourselves so that we know there are no limits. Limits mean restrictions. Restrictions mean guidelines, and guidelines mean standards. We are our worse critic, which would only mean one thing. We are now taking that beautiful potential and shortening it because we have told ourselves that we just don't have what it takes. The second you take a jump and do something you are scared of, you have officially added on to the list of "things I can do", and you become something that exuberates confidence. Confidence leads to adrenaline. Humans feed off of the energy that develops when something good happens to us. Winning a game (success) Falling in love (happiness) The ability to be proud (a forever kind of priceless). Somehow though, we restrict ourselves. Without tackling fear, you never try anything. If you try you become standardless, because nothing can limit you.
Instead of simply challenging themselves and seeking an open mind, some people conform to a synthetic form of adrenaline release. Drugs, alcohol, addictions, selfish acts, painful words. Yes, these all will release endorphins.. But lets say that we rid our minds of instant gratification. Let's say we want to experience the drive of live because we are proud of the journey we want to take, not the destination we dream to fulfill.
Pretened for a moment that society eliminated negative self-talk, and we all seemed to have (no longer just wish) no guide to what will be. We just traveled and explored the ability to reach and and grab that scary task, and show it who is boss. Infact, fear is no longer a factor in this. Yes, you will always have fear, we are humans and that's how we are made. It's just that you no longer have to make these conscious decisions to attempt something with the fear of failing. Inevitably your crazed development and focus on the anticipation of failing leads to negative self-talk. Negative self-talk leads to a standard. (need mind you, any standard you set is restricting the potential you know you have). A standard leads to accepting lack of growth. Lack of growth leads to instant gratification. From here the cycle starts all over again.
Fate and destiny... Two fine things I believe flow in this world. My belief is that fate is something that is a part of you that you cannot change, people that come and go in your life, moments and situations that surround you, and any thing else that defines those "life moments". These I believe you cannot change. What you do with the list I mentioned is your destiny. Destiny can be altered at the last moment. It can be anything your heart desires. You pick your destiny. Fate just gives you some ground rules to work with. Instant gratification is an ugly thing sometimes. It leads you to believe that your destiny is unfixable. We justify destiny and the "destination" of our life by the outcome of fate. We fail to see that the outcome of fate relies on us. Instead of dedicating time to pushing through the moments that are hard (fate), we blame destiny. We then think that our destiny is our destination. Forgetting all the while, that the journey is what we need to have with the destination being a stepping stone in our journey. Not the end.
What is your destiny? Is it to be rich, famous, married, poor, lonely, eager, lazy? When destiny would come to my mind I would try and look forward to the future. Picturing my destiny and what exactly my life was going to end up being. I always felt as though (still sometimes do) that I am just waiting for my life to start. Mean while I don't realize that my life began a while ago, I'm just waiting for instant gratification to deliver to me my destination. All these thoughts are common and a simple way to think. But what if, we went a little deeper... what if I stopped waiting for life to begin with the "successful stepping stones" approved by society. What if when somebody said destiny, I would picture looking BACK on my life instead of trying to piece it together based on my expectations I set of myself. Let's look back on our life when we are grey just to find out what our destiny had been. Destiny is what defined you as a person. How your life panned out. How you handled fate. Looking into the future to discover destiny is paired so equally with living life like a destination. You set one level for yourself that limits you. Predetermined destiny will strip you of your ability to take a journey. Your mind, heart, and soul will linger on the IDEA of what or who or where you want to be. You will rob yourself of life, you sit around a wait to start living based off of what you think your destiny is.
Earlier I mentioned that you can change your destiny. In a sense this is true. Not to contradict myself, but you don't really consciously change your destiny. You change your destiny by never having a limit on who you are. When you don't have limits, you are trainable and open minded. This curves your personailty and sculpts you into being able to adjust to fate. Humans were born with the ability to adapt. Take this and run with it. Adapt to fate by learning from prior fate occassions. (A.K.A learning from mistakes). If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten. Maybe, just maybe, there really isn't any karma or things that were just meant to happen for a reason. When you learn from a mistake, I truly believe that fate may test you time and time again just to make sure that your never limiting yourself to growing as a person. We aren't meant to develop restrictions on ourselves. We are meant to challenge everything that we are day by day. We should cling to the firm foundation of love, happiness, and success. All things that we strive for and base our life off of. These things define our journey. And that journey begins by recognizing your outter actions and changing your subconscious after. Not allowing your subconscious to change your actions. Maybe your actions and subconscious battle so much that you think that your subconscious is karma. Now, here me out on this... When we are children, we have innocence. Pure hearts that mean nothing but the best. We share, smile, run, never stress, and always appreciate the little things. We never leaned on instant gratification. We simply partook on life and accepted fate with open arms because or subconscious knew nothing else. Our lack of experience with situations made us open minded and trainable. So you see since day one we established a subconscious mindset of right and wrong, good or bad, happy or sad, worth our time or not. But, unfortunately, as time goes on and we grow up, we began to interact with more people. Learn things about fate. Form opinions based on the reactions or words we experienced from the way others handled their fate. That pure layer of subconscious stablitity and foundation is now being weighted down with this self-talk that doesn't mesh well. It stacks up building layers of feelings and ideas of who we are. It doesn't just stay as one, because nothing is as sacred as our spirits when we were innocent. Fate strolls along everyday. But one day, fate is escorted with a situation that is tough to handle. Say we handled it poorly, then next thing you know karma turns around and "gets us back" somehow.
Once again I will say that your actions have to match your subconscious. Deep down in your subconscious, the innocence and pure foundation of what life is, is telling you that what you did was wrong. You keep telling yourself this, without even realizing it. All the while your "adult" subconscious is justifying itself to you. Bringing up more recent memories and reminding you why it was okay to act like that. Shoving instant gratification and everything that it comes with into your conscious. Eventually making your actions match your thought process, in turn, causing a negative result of "bad karma". Because of instant gratification, we falsely pick and choose what we can change and what we cannot. We find the same adrenaline in accomplishing a hard task as we do in the drama of life. No matter what sparks your chemicals in your brain, it is and always will be the same chemical that fuels us to want different things. To want success. To have hopes. Being able to recognize this allows us to apply that energy to: doing something that scares us every day, being aware enough to change our actions and let our subconscious catch up last, being able to live a journey instead of dwelling on a destination. It allows us to take control of gratification in the smallest form, and change it into something that is rich in meaning. Recognizing that there are an unlimited amount of paths to travel down in life opens up your heart to change, journey, and accepting fate. It pushes you to handle right and wrong. It encourages you to stick to the innocent subconscious and not punish yourself for shame you may feel. Being accepting of challenges and the million of paths you can travel, will only expand you as a person. It will rid you of that expectation and standard of what you can and cannot do. If you are doubtful of what you can be and/or who you are, push yourself a little farther. Start the cycle of no limits. Start the journey and forget the destination. Lose the instant gratification and gain the desire to self-assess. Wake up and notice life has already started. It's just waiting on you.
