I love this time of year. The crisp cool air, the scarves and hot cocoa, and let’s not forget the Earths last colorful hurrah before winter begins. As color starts exploding all around us, I can’t help but catch myself gazing off into the distance at it. What a beautiful world we have! How often do we all get to look and appreciate it? I myself have really struggled with this lately. I found myself so busy and caught up at work that I almost forgot my favorite season was upon us! Lately, I have been realizing that I have been making the wrong choices when it comes to my life. The last few weeks, I have chosen to put all my energy, efforts, and thoughts into strict work because of the pressures and stress work can sometimes bring. As a result, my consequence of this decision has left me feeling tired and ill lately, along with a sad feeling of missing my friends and loved ones from seeing them so little. This was not an intentional choice I made, it just happened. However, looking back I realize I shouldn’t have worried so much about work when it’s the love of my family and friends that matter the most to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually love my job. I think I might be one of the few people who actually does enjoy their 40-hours-a-week job. However, I need to learn boundaries. My cousin once told me there are a time and place for everything. A time to be a kid, a time to be an adult, a time for work, and a time for play. The older I get, the more I think he may be on to something there. Learning these walls and boundaries are part of growing up and accepting life. Well, I think it’s high time I learn to create boundaries in my life. But where to start?
I can’t help but wonder if it all starts with my choices. I know by watching the news or reading some articles on the web, many people make excuses for their choices or blame others. It’s easy for me to say, “I had a stressful week because work has been busy.” Well, is it my works fault I was stressed or was it how I chose to handle it? I can’t control the workload, and I can’t control the traffic on the roads, but I can control myself. I have noticed with myself, and I wonder if the same is true with others, that when I do let myself get frustrated and stressed, I begin to dwell on it. I start getting annoyed at little things that usually wouldn’t bother me most days. So, then I started to take notes and I decided to do a little experiment. As my workload got higher and my stress began to grow, I decided to handle it in a new way. Instead of trying to rush and think how I am going to get it all done, I decided to take a deep breath and pause.
I made a list of the things that were most important to me. My list included my family, friends, my dreams of my future, my schooling, and even my hobbies. As my list grew I began to see a new perspective. Wearing myself out over work, no matter how much I like my job, wasn’t worth making myself feel worse, tired, or emotional when I get home to be with my family. I realized, my managers know who I am and know that I always try my best ,and if I can’t get it all done then I can’t get it all done. So, why was I putting myself through so much stress? There is no shame in needing help or being stressed at work. Especially since the workload increased because business began to boom. I realized that when I turn the perspective around, I saw that I can carry out my day in much better spirits all because of the choice I made in handling it. Suddenly, my emotional and stressed-out week shifted into a positive day, leaving me with a happy mood and energy to enjoy spending time with my family that night.
A man once said, “Life gives to all the choice. You can satisfy yourself with mediocrity if you wish. You can be common, ordinary, dull, colorless, or you can channel your life so that it will be clean, vibrant, progressive, useful, colorful, and rich.” I don’t know much about this man, but I can’t help but think he had a point. Maybe he means we have more power of the outcome in our lives than we think? Is our lives something that just happens to us, or is it something we mold and create? I like to think it’s something we create for ourselves.
I know that some people are born in harsh conditions or circumstances. Yet, I also believe most people will have the power to change their conditions and leave the negative of their lives behind to build and create a new life, but it starts with a choice. Five years ago, I had no idea I would find a love in writing. I was working a job in customer service witnessing the worst in humanity at times it seemed, yet I realized I needed something new. I made a choice to start looking for something new, which lead me to school. Now, I am not saying that school is always the answer for everyone. But, I can’t help but feel that if people have a desire, even a small desire for something new or a change in their life like I did for education, then they should follow it. Chase your dreams because if you don’t, one day you might find yourself standing in a life you regret.
Children learning to walk fall many times before they run. This doesn’t make them failures, it teaches them the muscles they need, the skills to use, and to balance themselves so they can run someday. Is it the floor’s fault they lost balance and perhaps hit their head? Of course not, and I don’t believe it’s the children’s fault either. It’s just practice, a learning step, and exercise, something that sometimes happens as we work towards a goal. In the child’s case, their goal would be walking. How do they handle it? Eventually, they try again. The choice to walk is theirs when they are ready.
I can’t help but feel the same is true with us all, even as adults! I chose to handle a stressful week by over working, over thinking, and getting angry and stressed because I didn’t know what to do and didn’t like the problem before me. I had taken a few good steps at work and then fell, making me blind to the situation with no patience and no self-control with my stress level. Now, I can see how all of that could have been avoided, had I exercised my patience, perspective, and self-control taking a better step in a different way. Now I wonder, what would the world be like if everyone had better patience, perspective, and self-control?
It’s sad how we as a people have let other things control us so much. Things like money, fashion, society, popularity, even our own emotions try to control us instead of us controlling ourselves. Yet, are they important? I can’t help but wonder why so many of our emotions from it all can sometimes get inside our heads influencing our choices, just like how I let my frustrations of a stressful work week get the better of me. I see others letting money control their choices, and I see others letting society tell them how to live or what to choose. In the end, we all have choices. We all are people with a common goal in life. I believe that goal is to find and obtain real peace and happiness. Yet, sometimes I have noticed that when we forget we have a choice on how to handle life, we start getting angry, even selfish, and begin to lose a sense of ourselves like I did this past week. Going forward, I want to strive to remember this new perspective I found. I don’t want life, society, or anyone making my choices anymore or dictating my mood. That power is with me in my life, as it is with others in their life. I believe we have the power inside each of us to try and be better people if we choose to. We all have the power to choose how to handle our day if we only pay attention and exercise it. I also can’t help but feel we have the ability to realize that sometimes the hardest choices in life are not between two right choices or two wrong choices or having no choice at all because we use the excuse, ‘it is what it is’. It’s about realizing there is always a choice before you and it’s about how you choose to handle it. While it’s easy to blame others for our moods or choices, at the end of the day, you can still choose how to react to the elements and world around you.
This was a hard and emotional lesson I have learned in my labyrinth of life recently. I hope we all can find a way to have a more positive perspective in our life and the world around us, helping us make better choices. Because after all, isn’t a positive perspective helping us all make positive choices better than keeping a negative and bleak perspective? I think many of us have seen where the bleak perspective leads us. Let’s see where this positive perspective and better choices take us. What do you think?
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