If you had it all,
How would you proceed differently?
How would you structure your time?
Would you reach deeper into your needs and values bucket?
Would you have more gratitude or take more things for granted?
What do you want to learn in this lifetime?
Not what do you want.
Family,
Children,
Travels to exotic lands,
Benchmark success,
Respect from peers.
What do you want to learn?
Not what subject,
What area of focus I'm talking about.
What lessons?
These are taken for granted because most of the time they are painful to learn.
Lifting weights,
Cardio,
And a hoax of fitness regiments involve pain,
Yet are beneficial.
The same goes for lessons.
They are the biggest building blocks,
Great ones you will always remember and perhaps pass on to others.
If we consider swapping lives with this imaginary version of us in the future,
With the trappings of these items,
Acquisitions,
Belongings,
And achievements of life with everything,
Then what have we gained?
Except different set design,
Obligations,
And interactions.
But what about us?
How have we changed?
This is the root of the matter.
This is what we strive for.
The impact and struggle of the growth is the outcome.
I did a lot of traveling in my early 30s for almost a year,
And I always find myself telling the same three stories that took place during that journey.
They all have a common thread.
I was lost.
I was in danger.
I was resolute,
Open,
Resilient,
Maybe even worried perhaps.
In these moments,
There was an arc.
There was a lesson.
There was a bounty.
That rich experience that can only be delivered and constructed from the compound of all of those aggregate emotions and values and resiliences to the challenges I faced.
The best stories are typically those fraught with some challenge.
Unless your objective is to just sunbathe at a fancy resort.
When people say they want to travel,
Not go on a vacation,
But travel,
What they want is the experience of traveling,
Which means all of the struggle too.
Losing your wallet,
Getting scammed,
Getting poured on in a monsoon,
Missing your train station,
And getting off on a platform where no one speaks your language and you have no idea of where you are.
Pre-smartphone,
Getting food poisoning.
This is part of it.
Yet how often are these the top stories that we tell?
How we managed to get through this?
This is reality.
These are not pleasant situations in the moment,
But we will remember these moments forever.
We earn these moments.
It's not the actual moment,
But what the moment is filled with.
We don't often ask for pain,
But we need it.
It exists for a reason.
It is a composite that adds to our relief,
Our gratitude,
Our awareness,
And our full experience,
Our understanding,
Our triumph,
Our truth,
Our courage,
Our testament of faith,
Fortitude,
And foundation.
When we envision a life of having everything we want,
To have those things without the trials,
The falls,
And dust-ups,
Misfires,
Losses,
Is it still as desirable?
We have to respect our lot and learn from it and move as if we had these things,
Yet with the understanding of what would get us out of bed in the morning and how would we structure our life?
Would we have the same urgency,
The same incentive?
It's pretty obvious that this existence is more than just for the fun stuff,
So best to embrace that.
Dig your heels in and take the full ride.
