“And now go and make interesting mistakes.  Make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes,” Neil Gaiman.  We tend to take life too seriously.  There is a balance, we know that some decisions are heavier than others but we need to be able to find the balance to move forward.  Let go of what other people think of us and just do the damn things.  Stop being so self-centered and take the risk.  Ironically the way to stop thinking about ourselves is to simply be ourselves—follow our instincts, give up ego, and just do what calls to us.  When we get out of our heads and connect with the feelings we understand what feels right for us.  Mistakes don’t matter.  We don’t need to take life seriously.  We don’t get hung up on what we “should” do and we allow ourselves to learn what we “must” do, the path we need to follow.  We learn what makes sense to ourselves and we can do that without fear of repercussion.  We understand that the greatest repercussion is missing out on our own lives because we try to please others.  We say no to the things we really want to be doing in favor of what we think we should be doing and then resentment builds.  A cycle begins that we feel we can’t stop and we wake up having lived the same life every day rather than living the live we were meant to have.

How we stop that is by doing what Gaiman says.  This life is an experiment and we were all given different tools, different understanding, different callings, different drives, and different talents.  We are meant to test those tools and see what we can make with who we are, not how we can conform those tools to be who everyone else is.  How dry and boring is that?  We were given these expressions (and chose this life and these trials if we believe that) for a reason and we are meant to use it.  Nothing is more suffocating that stifling our own voices because we fear what people will say or how they will react.  It’s shutting down the very essence of our beings for the potential reaction of someone else.  The very thing that sets us free is our ability to follow our instincts and trust what we know—and trust that we can learn from what we do to apply it and do better when the time comes.  The things that others may label as a mistake (and we may initially think it a mistake as well) can be the very thing that we need to set us forward toward the very answers we need.  Sometimes we find those mistakes weren’t mistakes at all.

Life is simply too short to waste it tailoring our actions based on how we THINK people will react.  If we think about it the very notion of that is ridiculous: we stop ourselves from even trying because we think we know what someone will potentially say.  We aren’t mind readers.  The human animal still operates with the survival brain, we haven’t evolved enough to understand that the ego has nothing to do with survival—or that we can’t actually predict every thought that goes through someone else’s mind.  How often do we hold ourselves back or miss out for the possibility that someone will say something negative to us?   Why don’t we start asking ourselves, “Who cares if they react this way?  Even if it’s something I perceive as a negative reaction, who cares?”  I’d rather find out what I am capable of and learn what I am meant to do by following the call of my heart than waste my life trying to predict every other person’s reaction before I’ve even tried to make it happen (whatever it is).  So make those mistakes, take those chances, and find the beauty in a life you may not have ever been able to imagine.