You know how important I feel it is to never let life happen without intention, but to take charge and make it happen. Setting the groundwork for each new phases of one’s life is essential if the true desire is to continue to live a meaningful existence. By "meaningful" I mean one that continues to challenge and educate versus keeping us trapped in old comfort zones.
Today, we watch others reinvent all the time now. In a social media-driven world we are bombarded with personal stories of people making huge changes in their lives to the point where we’re almost numb to these ‘transformation stories.’ These pithy, viral 15-minute accounts of people’s lives never tell the whole story nor do they offer any templates for others to reinvent, because there are none.
Yes, we share the fact that we are all human. However our individual experiences are different (no matter how hard we fight for external uniformity and acceptance), and each internal heart is one of a kind. While we all (hopefully) have a sense of right and wrong, we all rationalize and manifest our mortality, morality in basic MO in completely different ways too.
Only we individual human beings know when it’s time to reinvent whether we ever actually do anything about it or not. There’s an innate trigger in us that starts churning, and suddenly there are days when we’re acuity aware of what isn’t working in our lives.
It shows up as discontent first. Being human, we tend to go directly from discontent to martyrdom because often that’s all we know. The truth is, it’s actually not discontent even though it feels like it. What it is, is the preverbal ‘wakeup’ call from the heart. It’s the spiritual heart (connected to the whole universe) checking in with the intellectual head (connected only to our direct human experience). It’s the soul really saying, “Hey, how are you? Are you happy with your choices so far? Are you getting restless? Are you ready to push forward into new territory yet?”
Our gut reaction from our logical head is usually, “Yes I’m discontent, who isn’t, I’d change things if I could but I can’t”. Meanwhile, our heart nudges again.
Like pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock we often go back to spiritual sleep versus putting our feet on the floor and saying, “Okay you’re right, we DO have to review things!”
Therefore, the first step in the reinvention process is to stop pushing the spiritual snooze button.
Then the stark reality phase (we tend to avoid) begins. During this period, rather than focusing on what we don’t have (which we ‘victim mentality’ humans do) we should be making a list of what we’ll need for the new journey ahead. ‘Don’t’ means we won’t but ‘need’ keeps the door open for possibilities that help us begin the ‘life inventory’ phase.
We have to unpack the bags from the old life. We have to edit the old standby tools that worked once but no longer apply. We then have to repack new personal APPS that, while untested might better serve us better once we get beyond our ‘same-old’ comfort zone and step out into a new world where we begin to make new choices and begin living life with joy versus fear.