After my latest update on The Road So Far, a friend of mine sent me this picture.
I love seeing these little reminders that life is what we make it. I suppose you might call that mind over matter, but it’s really more mind over emotional well-being.
I don’t know where I’ll be in a month. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in a month. Regardless of those variables — variables fully under my control if I could just make a decision — I’ll still be the same old me in a different context.
And this image reminded me that context and how I react to that context is a choice. My choice.
I can choose to embrace my anxiety over the future and the future me reverting to past bad habits; or, I can choose to embrace the unknown.
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I do believe that, if you’re open to it, life (or the universe, or what-have-you) will provide the guidance you need. Case and point, this particular reminder showed up on my Facebook when I started to spiral into anxiety.
I’m not claiming that everything happens for a reason because I don’t believe that. Really bad things happen to really good people, and I can’t reconcile a world where they “need” those awful experiences.
Speaking from a place on the other side of Bad Experience, though, I can tell you that we are always able to grow from those bad things. Sometimes that’s a very long path to walk. Sometimes it feels like a long, dark, terrifying tunnel. (A lot like that tunnel in Wyoming, actually.) And sometimes you reach what you thought was the end, only to confront a fork in your road.
I feel like I’m standing at one of those forks right now, staring down the barrel of five or six different paths. I have no idea how to embrace one of them, or which one to embrace. Which is scary. But also, I’m not gonna lie, a little exhilarating.
My life is so full of possibility right now.
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But, for today, my task is simple(ish)…
- accept that I have control even if it doesn’t feel like it
- let go of my fear of the past repeating
- have faith in myself
Easy-peasy, right?
Not Quite Flying Solo 