Jenny and Erin

It seems there are two common ways to live life - as a serious and dreadful march to your death or as an adventure with many unexpected twists and turns. Your choice ultimately determines the trajectory of your everyday life, including your dreams. It is worth asking yourself how you have chosen to live your life, as a death march or a grand adventure?

In my experience it seems the easiest default for most people in facing goals, much less daily life, is the death march mentality. This “get it done at any cost” way of viewing the world and the insistence that “perfect“ is possible is seductive. Heck, even knowing this, if I’m not careful my most sought after adventures have morphed into a death march. Perhaps this is tied to unrealistic beliefs about life and assumptions we fail to question. Such as:

• Believing that if you just do the “right” things or make the “right” choices you will have a happy, pain free life;
• Believing if you were only smart enough it would be possible to live a mistake-free life, with none of the embarrassing mishaps you seem to suffer on an all-to-regular basis;
• Believing the answers to your life should come easily, since they seem to for everyone else; or
• Believing it is possible to live a life in which the things you want and/or the decisions you make aren’t quite so difficult and don’t hurt nearly as much.

If any of these beliefs are familar I’d kindly suggest it is time to re-evaluate. Death march and adventure mentalities change one’s internal experience. They change how you view yourself and consequencely how others view you. I have found this in relation to pain. There are times in our lives that all of us hurt. Whether this pain is physical or emotional isn’t pertinent, as the end result is the same. Pain makes it is easy to trip, stumble and even fall. But how deep the pain cuts, how hard you fall and whether or not you try to get up depends to a great degree on how you view your life.

Pain when walking a death march drags you down, grows as you complain and causes pretty horrible decision making. It leads to fear, failure and continually mounting losses. It causes you to draw away from others, and oftentimes an unacknowledged desire to inflict pain on those closest to you so they can get some understanding of just how bad you feel. Even though it is never said, when you’re living life as a death march, you often welcome the pain (and maybe even “accidently” inflict more) because it means you can quit and no one can blame you.

On the other hand, the mind is a funny thing. By choosing to live life as an adventure, the same pain can be viewed quite differently. Pain is now an indicator of a steep learning curve, a clue to a weakness you must address before continuing on your journey or a test of your desire. This pain can still bring you to tears and tempt you to quit, but ultimately it challenges and draws you closer to those nearest to you. In an adventure it becomes clear there may not always be a lesson to pain. Rather, despite the best planning and all the best intentions bad things just happen. Pain is an inherent part of life.

You can choose to live and experience your life however you want. You can (and already do) determine how you want to view your mistakes and failures both to yourself and others. And even if you decide to have your life be a grand adventure it won’t necessarily be easier - you still will make mistakes, answers will still be hard to find and you still will experience pain - but you will have the knowledge that you are making a life not just floating along.

This entry was posted in Personal Development on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 by Jenny. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.