How to Change Your Life
Happiness, as they say, is an inside job.
The First Question:
The first question is easy: do you need to change your life? Reflections and resources are everywhere, but honesty is the tool you need.
Okay, so there are issues. The next question is, what do you need to change? People are unhappy with all kinds of things, their looks, their financial picture, their relationships, even their job and family! But underneath all that is the core reality that is your experience, your feelings, your spirit, your soul. You.
Four Questions
In an earlier blog post, Loomings of a California Spiritual Journey, I listed four questions I planned to answer by reflecting deeply while driving 1400 mi to California and back by myself over spring break. I was going to change my life, there was no question in my mind. The only question was how.
These were the questions I planned to ask myself:
First Question: What Went Wrong with My Life Plan?
Second Question: Did I Make Some Critical Errors in Thinking?
Third Question: Who am I now, and who do I want to be?
Fourth Question: Is the Person I want to be Reachable?
It’s Been a While …
It has been a while since I wrote those questions and during that time I have changed my life and looking back on the questions I think to myself man you were so lost.
What do I mean? Well look at the questions. “Life Plan?” Who has a “Life Plan” except someone in their early 20’s? Errors in critical thinking? I mean, who doesn’t have that? As for the person I want to be and whether that person is reachable, it’s not like I’m one of those people who believes I was born in the wrong body or anything. In the past I’ve believed I could be satisfied by doing the right thing … at least mostly.
And yet there I was
Planning to drive to California and solve my problems.
This impulse to take a journey and purify yourself and learn about yourself in the process, thereby changing your life, is as old as history.
It can’t be truly stupid if everyone is doing it …right?
So what do I think now about how to change my life … or your life?
I think that the Buddhist may be on to something with all that talk about attachments. It is, I’ve come to think, our attachments that make us behave in a way that we would not want to do if we are looking at ourselves from the outside.
It is our addictions and not just to substances but to relationships, to social position, to appearances, and to ideologies that make it impossible for us to take care of the things that we should really be taking care of.
And it is our lying to ourselves that allows us to keep doing things that, if we really understood, we would not be doing on and on and on and on.
One day a person might wake up and say,
“Oh my God what have I been doing!!!” And that is the day when that person can begin to change their life.
Changing your life means cutting through the Gordian Knot of all of your habits and expectations and other people’s habits and expectations and suddenly jumping into the middle of everything and saying I’m not doing this anymore.
Doing that means taking a lot of risks.
If you change your routines, if you upset the apple cart so to speak, you will lose the assets that you’ve been working all this time to develop. Assets like relationships, jobs, public perceptions of who you are, even financial holdings can be lost when you change your life.
But these are the very things that keep you from moving forward. They are the very things that you must sacrifice if you want to be a new and different person.
There’s always that risk when you change your life that you’ll be one of those people that your friends say “Yeah they were doing okay and then they suddenly got these weird new ideas and lost their mind and went and lived in the desert and quit their job and stop speaking to everybody and last we heard of them they were living in Tucumcari in a rain barrel…
I do not mean to say you need to find yourself …
In the 70s there was these women who would finish raising their kids and then jump up and run away from their husband and grown children to “find themselves” that is not what I am talking about.
Remembering back, I wonder if my trip to California was my own version of finding myself. Unfortunately I didn’t really find anything that I could use to spiritually evolve.
Really when you go “find” yourself, all you can find is yourself. And it’s you that you have to change. I guess you might say I discovered that much on my trip.
In the end your life is your only possession, it is the only thing you really have and unfortunately you only have it for a little while so the real question we’re asking here is are you happy with how you’re spending you’re only possession? If not then you have some work to do.
I came back from California realizing that I had to live within the confines of my situation, my job, house, family, being divorced. But I also eventually realized that how you live is more important than what you have. For example, yoga saves me from a lot of bad thinking,
Changing your life takes time. Some of the steps you can do include:
- self reflection
- journaling
- support groups and counseling
- exercise
- reading self help books, though not too many
- considering how you spend the hours of your day
- talking to friends about how they see various vexing situations
- learning to be alone
- learning to be a friend
- investigating new activities and/or opportunities that you didn’t do before because it was too scary, expensive, uncool or uninteresting
- learning to say no to stuff you actually don’t want to do
- learning to say yes when you do want to do something even if someone might judge you
- being your own best friend
Now notice that I did not include living in Tucumcari in a rain barrel.
But I bet if you did that your life would change too. Just maybe not for the better. Unless you’re an ascetic. Apparently such people exist; they get a kick out of living on almost nothing, Huck Finn did, in a barrel down by the river, long before Chris Farley ever started his humor routine about the same basic thing, except for using a van instead of a barrel.
Check out minute 2:50 for the part about living in a van down by the river …
Ok, humor break is over.
It’s All About Integrity and Peace
If you see something that you want and you are willing to go to any lengths to get it then you should be ready to make some changes but I’m not talking about jobs or love affairs I am talking about integrity and peace. And you can’t develop those over night.
It takes time to change your life, it’s a crock pot meal, not a short order take out. Integrity and peace are the things that I feel are really worth sacrificing for. Without them you will always want to change your life. With them you will feel content regardless of the physical realities you’re dealing with.
Even if it’s a van down by the river!
Annotated Bibliography for “How to Change Your Life”
Betterup: How to Change Your Life. The most comprehensive list of reasons you might want to change your life I’ve ever seen. Also this: “Our data shows that 55% of people are languishing.” I think that’s pretty generous. I hope you can agree with me here: we’re not languishing like those other guys.
From Mark Manson: How to Change Your Life. In which he argues that, actually, it isn’t about your car, house, job, or romantic partner, it’s about *you* and the fact that you don’t do enough of the right things. He’s a consultant, of course. Very glib, but some good points.
Oberlo: 9 Steps for How to Change Your Life. Noteworthy for including the concept of a “keystone habit,” a behavior change that triggers other behavior changes.
The Muse: 57 Small Changes You Can Make to Change Your Life. Some of which include, assume people have good intentions, don’t get sucked into political discussions, let go of the results, and turn off the background TV.
