Life.
Sometimes, quite a lot of times in fact, it’s just chaos. Everything around us seems to be falling apart and often it’s not just one thing that goes wrong, but several. It’s usually the case that if something can go wrong, it will.. And often more than one thing at a time. Great news, right?
But I’d like to share an opinion today which suggests this is a good thing. I’m saying it’s good when things go wrong. At this point you might think I’m crazy, but let me explain.
The explanation I’m going to give is pretty detailed and long winded, so bear with me. I promise it will be worth it. You’ll hopefully come away having learned something and maybe even be a little bit inspired.
So, everything’s going wrong
Let’s say that you lose your job, break up with your partner and have a huge bill come through the mail. The next day your car breaks down, you get a cold and your friends all seem to be distancing themselves from you at the same time.
What’s going on? Well, it’s ‘sods law’ at play. Anything that can happen, will happen eventually. The reason we think it’s like ‘everything goes wrong at once’ is because we only notice things when they happen in patterns, to some degree.
We notice when a collection of things go wrong at the same time, but if any SINGLE one of those things happened in isolation we wouldn’t really notice or mind that much. If we JUST got a cold, but everything else was fine then we’d just treat it as a normal part of everyday life..
But when lots of things happen at once it can be overwhelming and scary.
It can seem like the world is out to get you but I assure you it’s not the case.. Quite the opposite.
You see, In my opinion when bad things happen to us, it’s a great opportunity to learn something and to remember something. The thing you learn is of course dependent on the situation, if you lost your job because you were too slow or lazy, then the obvious lesson would be to work faster and stop being lazy..
But there is also an opportunity to remember something..
To remember that we’re in control of our lives.. We all are choosing and guiding our lives every minute of every day and by the choices we make and the thoughts we have, we mold and birth our future.
It’s all about choices
I’m getting to the main point, don’t worry. So everything’s going wrong, or is it? I mean.. let’s just take this idea that we control every aspect of our lives with our choices a bit further. Let’s look at real life examples.
Example 1) – Getting a cold. Of course there are lots of times when we get colds but often we can avoid them by simply maintaining a strong immune system. By making choices like meditating, taking a multivitamin and eating good healthy food we can reduce the risk of us getting colds by a huge amount. Choices we make daily affect us getting a cold or getting sick.
Example 2) – Relationship breakups. Some relationships break up SIMPLY because the other person didn’t feel they wanted to be in the relationship anymore, and so ended it. In those situations, it’s not really to do with our choices, although our choices do affect it… Let’s say you choose to be slightly controlling or protective, and you don’t realize it but slowly that’s eating away at your partner and making them feel trapped..
Eventually they’ll just reach breaking point and end the relationship, and it would have been a direct result of your choices. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re making choices like this, but we are. If we pay attention, we’re actually in control of every aspect of our lives.
Example 3) – Losing your job. If you make yourself valuable to a company, and put in hard work you’re less likely to get fired than if you just coast by. Think about it, why would a company fire someone who’s ALWAYS working hard, putting in the extra work when they think no-ones watching, attention to detail etc..? They wouldn’t unless they really had to. If on the other hand there was someone who just did the minimum amount of work needed to get by, they’d be the first to go when the company had to cut costs and lower their payroll.
So you see no matter the situation, we make choices.
I know at this stage some of you are maybe thinking about examples such as walking down the street at night and getting attacked. You would argue that this was clearly not a choice that we’ve made, and therefore an external force has come into play, i.e, the other people attacking you.
Even in this situation, you would have made the choice to walk down the street, knowing that there was a certain amount of risk.
More risk if you walked alone at night, but even walking down the street in the daytime, there’s always a risk, however small, of getting attacked or tripping and hitting your head.
You still choose to do these things though, because a life without risk just doesn’t exist.
Risk is always present in everything we do.. And we make choices often knowing about the risks involved. It’s only when something bad DOES happen that seems like it’s out of our control that we blame the world or the universe, but the choice was always ours in the first place.
Everything goes wrong.. What to do?!
So moving onto the meat of this post, what should you do when everything goes wrong in your life?
Well, start by just letting go. If you’re upset because your partner has moved on and you want them back but they’re already happy with someone else, just let it go. Realize that you have to let it go, because there’s nothing to hold onto. They were never ‘yours’.. And perceived ownership of a person is the fastest way to lose them entirely.
Experience it for what it is and then move on.
Sure it might be hard at the start but the more you understand that nothing in this life lasts forever, the faster you can move on from such situations. I’ve recently broke up with a partner who I was with for about 2 years, and it took me about 8 hours to move on.
It’s only when we let our ’emotional fog’ take over that we experience things like regret and heartbreak/pain.
Meditate for an hour and you’ll just ‘see’ the situation for what it is, and won’t have any bad feelings at all. You’ll just know that it’s over and there’s nothing you can do, therefore why worry about it? No sense holding onto something that only exists now in your mind and memories. The past.. You can’t get the past back.
All you can do is CHOOSE how to act in the now, or in the present moment. that’s all we can do! Just make better choices, and choose to feel good. It’s really that simple..
I’ve long been a believer that it’s important to focus on how we feel individually, it’s very important. Focus on feeling good, and if a thought, belief or feeling doesn’t make you happy or put you in a positive frame of mine, just disregard it and find another thought.
Does it feel good to ‘miss’ a person after a breakup? To argue because you’re always getting on at your partner for being out with their friends? No. So don’t do it.. Don’t choose to have those feelings.
I know I’ve used a relationship as an example here, but it applies really to anything. The reason you’re not making £100,000 a year is because you haven’t decided to.
If you decided to do that, you’d look up the methods, you’d associate yourself with like minded people, and you’d work from the moment you got up to when you couldn’t keep your eyes open to make it happen.. But we make choices, and these choices decide how our lives play out.
I’ve made the choice to not let external events upset me emotionally, or to let my happiness depend on other people. Since making that choice I’ve experienced an almost constant good mood, like a little engine just humming in my heart all the time, supplying me with energy and happiness. It comes from within.
So let’s talk a little bit about what happens when w e experience something negative.
What happens when something goes wrong
Often we are surprised, and don’t really know how to react. We know that things COULD go wrong at any given time, but it’s only when they do that we panic and don’t know what to do about it.
The thing is, if you make the following choices –
- To observe things as they are, without judment
- To always look for how you can improve
- To not base your happiness on external factors
- To be aware of everything around you
Then when something goes wrong it’s just another chance for you to get stronger. Another chance for you to improve yourself, and another chance for you to become more experienced and wise.
It’s like weight training, if you don’t stress your muscles and break them down, they won’t grow back stronger. Your muscles would stay exactly the same unless you forced them to break so that they’d have to fix themselves. They fix themselves and come back stronger and bigger..
For this reason, I welcome changes and difficult challenges.
Without them, we don’t grow and we don’t push ourselves.
Sure, it’s going to be fucking difficult when everything’s falling apart around you. When you decide to go the opposite way toe everyone else and do your own thing, it’s difficult. It’s not what society wants and some of your friends will push against you..
But that’s the point!
The fact that it’s difficult causes you to grow stronger and just by following your heart and doing what you want regardless of how hard it is, you’ll be MILES ahead of everyone else!
In starting my online business, some people object to it and have said things like ‘get a real job’ or ‘that won’t work’. I genuinely don’t even take these comments on board, because they’re based in fear. The person who said these things is scared that either –
- They will never sort their life out and achieve something great
- I’ll succeed and achieve something great
- or.. Both of the above
Honest criticism is important, and you have to tell the difference between people just putting you down cause they’re afraid, and people who’ve been where you’re trying to and they’re offering advice.
But, without difficult situations, we don’t grow as human beings. One of the ‘problems’, (I use quotes for that because many don’t see it as a problem) of society specially in the UK and USA is that we have a system which doesn’t FORCE us to grow.
We can get a job stacking shelves working full time (aka- sell your soul) and have just enough money to pay bills and buy food. We could do that for 40 years, then retire and die. But what did you achieve?!
What did you DO with your life?! When did you learn, grow, improve and experience failures and victories?
The system allows us to make that choice though. In the UK, you can go on benefits and get most of lifes essentials given to you for free. But what value are you contributing to the world doing that? What’s the point of you being here?
How are you contributing to the advancement of our species?
It’s all about growing stronger
Whatever life throws at you, just be ready for it. Use it as a chance to grow stronger and become better. Or you could just stack shelves and die having never really lived. 🙂
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