Not What You Expected

I would write a post about New Year's Resolutions but I think my Christmas post pretty much covered what I hope for the future so I'll pass on that one.  Instead I'd like to impart some wisdom - if it qualifies as such.

If you're reading this, you're alive.  You're not dead.  Those sound like simple statements to make but they're facts we tend to forget at times.  There's a Nikki Minaj song, 'Moment 4 Life' where one of the lyrics read "To live doesn't mean you're alive" - I like that lyric because it makes you think about what it actually means to be alive.  If you're alive you have a life you can live, so live it.  If you have a life to live, don't let the pressures of life, and everything that can make you feel down, stop you from living your life.

There's a lot wrong with the world.  There's a lot of things that could go wrong with it.  Both of these things are undoubtedly true, but if you let these two facts stop you from living your life then you're already dead.  You might still be breathing but you're not doing much else.  You can't live life in fear of what might be, what might happen.  If you do then you'll deny yourself so much because of something that might not even happen.  Don't let yourself look back in decades to come and regret the things you should have done or would have done given the chance again.  Don't let yourself look back and think that you were so worried about something happening that in the end never happened.  Even if the things you worry about really do happen, anticipating pain is like enduring it twice.  The prick of a needle is hardly ever as bad as you think it will be, the vast majority of the time you never even feel it, what you built it up to be in your mind was so much worse than the reality.

We all know that the things we long for and desire and build up in our minds rarely turn out to be as good as we anticipated them to be, whilst that can be disheartening you can turn it on its head and use it as justification to ignore the things you would normally worry about - knowing that you're actually not that good at predicting the future and that experiencing things in your mind before they happen really is a fool's errand.

So as you sit today the first of the year and plan out all the things you want to achieve in the coming year, hold onto that belief that no matter how bad you dream the future to be, it won't be as bad as you think.  You'll survive, and you'll look back on it wondering why you were so worked up over it to begin with.

Happy New Year!