How to know what to Change

Some changes are obvious, not smoking is better for your health, exercising more is better. But what about other changes? Is it better to stay with your job or leave? Do you stay with your partner?

Some people vision board their dream lives, some journal, but the idea of a dream life is all important. Shoot for the moon, they say, and, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

That works for a lot of people. I can’t pretend it doesn’t, but, for me, all it does is highlight how my life isn’t that, and I don’t know the next step to get there. It leaves me feeling worse than if I had never thought about my dream life.

Instead, I look at my daily life and look at making that a bit better every day. I want to be content with what I have, so I shift how I look at my day and change happens.

For example, I work 10 hour shifts. They can be mentally draining, and, because I work from home, there’s no transition from work to home. My office is also the room I spend most of my downtime in. It has my desk, which I use for personal and work. I don’t have the space to create a real separation.

In order to separate my work life from my creative life, I have a personal laptop. That’s what I use for writing these blog posts, what I want to use for my fiction when I can get to that again. I intentionally set up my laptop to not have a lot of fluff. It has writing programs, and that’s about it.

It would be better if I could write in another part of the apartment, away from my work desk, but I’m content for now. That is a change I can make later.

To borrow an idea from Buddhism, (and this is my very vague and very loose understanding), life is full of suffering, like a wheel on a cart that isn’t quite the same size as the rest. You can either push against it, or accept it and move on.

I say accept that life will suck sometimes. Accept that you don’t have full control of your circumstance. Focus on your day and see what suffering you have been avoiding. Pay attention to it, be mindful of it, and see how you can elevate that.

Most importantly, don’t escape. Don’t withdraw. Be in it. Exist in it.

Find the suffering in your day to day. Feel it, then try to fix that in baby steps.

Start small. Suffering smarts, and it’s hard to be in it for too long. Try 15 minutes a day, even 5 minutes. Just start noticing.