“Don’t suffer imagined troubles.  We spend so much time worried about how bad things are going to be, that we actually torture ourselves more than the thing we’re worried about every could.  We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca.  This follows nicely after our piece Saturday about using our energy to worry.  Why would we spend our time creating destructive scenarios in our mind?  Most of us would agree that is what we seek to avoid and we’d all say we want the best outcome yet our brains tend to anticipate what’s wrong with a scenario over what’s right.  As we spoke about Saturday, that is the amygdala’s function—prepare for what’s wrong so we are kept safe.  I spent a majority of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop no matter what I was doing.  I approached every day ready to fight, searching for the next thing to tackle in an endless circle of useless vigilance.  I’m not saying there weren’t times it paid off—I pride myself on my ability to handle a real crisis.  I mean, I should be able to handle anything considering how often I’ve already played that scenario in my head.  But was it truly worth my time?  All the time spent worrying over what might happen rather than simply enjoying the moment.  All that time trying to be someone else or to appear a certain instead of allowing the real me to shine. 

When we use our energy to worry or to create things to be troubled over, we live in a troubled state.  We’re in our heads far more than anywhere and negative thoughts make our minds a veritable prison.  We are aware of this and we all acknowledge that we know we need to manage our thoughts yet it still proves to be one of the hardest things to do.  Those neural pathways are engrained deeply into the core of who we are and changing that routing takes a ton of effort, focus, and repeated trials.  It’s a real challenge to focus on what’s right after ages of finding what’s wrong.  It’s a trauma response.  If we live our lives in an ever vigilant state, it’s because we never felt safe.  Maybe we moved around a lot as a kid, maybe there was addiction in the family, maybe we had to take responsibility before we were ready, or maybe we were just witness to things we shouldn’t have been.  Regardless of the reason, we never learned to settle in our own skin and trust that no matter what happened we would be fine.  We thought we had to control the uncontrollable and we thought it all fell to us.  That’s a painful existence and it’s exhausting.  That translates to bigger and bigger things as we get older, creating more things we have to take control over.

The world will keep going regardless of what we do.  Whether we think we win or lose, there is always another day and there always will be.  There will come a day when the sun sets on our days and eventually that memory will fade into nothingness.  So with such precious little time here, we need to truly consider from the depths of our souls why we are so keyed up on being perfect, on worrying over things that will have little impact in the end.  That is to discourage people from trying to have an impact, rather, it’s to remind people that the only way we can have an influence is to act on something, to DO something and, no matter what we do, it will eventually be interpreted differently than we intended or it will be left with the wind.  Live life and live it well.  We were given the opportunity to experience all this world has to offer and we should jump in whole heartedly because we will never get another opportunity.  Don’t waste time pretending the world is on fire because we see the sun.  Face the light and take the leap.  No matter what we will land and we will learn.  We can’t live our lives in a bubble—we will not arrive at the finish line unscathed so we may as well take the time to dance in the light.