What am I worried about?

No matter what our “stories” are in life, the truth is that they have only one place they belong in our lives – yesterday. The stories that in some ways may have created us do NOT define us. Each day, we define ourselves through who we CHOOSE to be in any given moment, which defines the actions we take and decisions we make – even those that are not visible to the world. In fact, most of our decisions are made deep by rote response, unconsciously.
One of our most important tasks is to bring those decisions to 100% consciousness – to look at them in the light of day and consider their worth. Ask yourself, right now in this moment, the most important question of all:

What am I worried about?

Worry is the great thief of our lives, stealing the present and forcing us to sacrifice our joy, our inspiration, and our passion. Our greatest fear is death – and that fear can devour years of our lives. We lose precious LIFE worrying about our own death, and the loss of those we love.

Death is inevitable whether by choice or by default. By letting go of our own attachment to the rigidity of time, we have much more of it to appreciate by being present to the magnificence of the present moment before us. Sometimes we must simply go with the flow and allow the transgressions of our world to guide us along our individual paths. Time often serves to limit our focus on the moment instead of being present to it, for integrating structure over freedom, although boundaries are often a necessary evil, quite often diminishes our experience of life. Eventually we must fully release our own agenda for what the universe has in store for us. (Manual For Living: REALITY – A User’s Guide to the Meaning of Life – Page 6)

That release – consciously choosing in this very moment to be an active participant in our lives necessitates that we NOT be in our heads, lost in worry. It insists that we be 100% in our lives, as they are, and as they will unfold. Anxiety about the potential future, or the future-present does little to change that course. Decisions made and actions taken from a state of worry, rather than a state of engagement, distracts us from our joy and takes us down the wrong path. There is another truth well worth recognizing: Most of what we worry about never comes to pass.

So much of life is beyond our control. What we can control, at the very least, are the questions that we ask that can only be answered from our truth, from our soul, from the depths of our being.. If we look at the list of small and large distractions (worries) that distract us from our joy, and then release those that do not serve us, we will be empowered to live our lives –to focus on those situations and issues we can control and affect.

Even more, we will be empowered to consciously participate in the world around us, rather than being stuck in an internal dialogue of worries, fears and broken records of regrets and painful memories. We are not our past – and we are not are future. We are who we choose to be in every waking moment. To the extent we ponder that which we cannot change, we squander our precious beautiful existence.

Until next time, Seth