I was listening to some music the other day and was struck with the thought of how good certain musicians and bands are. Exponentially better than many others. At that particular moment, I was listening to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and was drawn in by how different the song was, how clear his voice was, and how their style varied from every band at the time. But then you look at the most famous bands at that time, and they all varied to some degree or another. Flash forward to today’s music, and you have the same experience. I was listening to Bruno Mars not too long ago and had the same feeling. I watched a movie that drew me in and blew me away. Read a book that changed how I thought about life. Listened to a podcast that extrapolated ideas I had been ruminating on and helped increase the depth of my thinking. These things constantly drive me back to the notion that life is truly amazing if you know where to look.
It’s not only where you look but how you look. Too many times, I wasted my chance to experience the profundity of life on my insecurities or my continuous ideation that I was less than because…
Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
– Ecclesiastes 1:2
This is how I viewed life.
In a sense, it’s true. What is the point? Why are we all striving and fighting only to watch ourselves slowly waste away to nothingness?
On the one hand, we are constantly at war with ourselves and others because we can’t for the life of us figure out how to integrate ourselves with the whole. Our entire perspective is me against them. Even in our family lives, we regulate ourselves down to this idea because our ego strives to get what it wants, and if it doesn’t, there’s a high potential for conflict.
On the other hand, life is packed with meaning. It’s everywhere.
You can literally marvel at anything if you pay close enough attention to it. A blade of grass is an entire world unto itself. An ant searching this way and that can be a world big enough to capture your imagination.
Life is truly amazing if you take the time to look at it, feel it, and experience it.
Your problem isn’t that life is hard. Your problem is that you make life hard because you won’t just lay down in the river of life and float.
Instead, you try to walk upstream because you think what you need lies there instead of allowing yourself to relax and come to it again further downstream.
So many people are striving, striving, striving. It’s celebrated in our culture. We think striving is how you make it in life.
It’s not.
This Is Why Life Is Truly Amazing
Do you want to know why life is truly amazing?
I’ll tell you.
It is because it is!
That’s it.
If you can’t see that, it’s because you’ve allowed yourself to get caught up in the tantrum thrown by your ego, trying to control everything so you can feel safe or have a sense of purpose. All the while forgetting that your ego doesn’t necessarily have your best interest in mind. You only think it does because you don’t know another way.
When you learn to step back and allow yourself to marvel at how amazing life is, you gain a new perspective that draws peace and joy into your life.
Just look at your body! How do you do you?!
Your body is an entire ecosystem in and of itself.
Imagine the world and everything in it. The mountains and oceans, plains and deserts. Now imagine all the animals on the planet, every species, and all the different shapes and colors contained within those species. Think about all the varieties of plants, trees, and flowers. Imagine the vast network of cities and all the various types of people who live there. That’s our world.
Now, think of your body. It contains all those same ingredients, but it looks slightly different. You are a world of your own, and that world is unique compared to all the other worlds out there.
Just look at your hand. Look at how amazing your hand is. Look at the lines, the pores, your nails! How does that even work?!
Your fingers all move and bend in ways you can’t even explain!
Uh, well, you see, the nerves contained within your hand fire based on impulses sent by your brain, and…Get Out With That Nonsense!
That may explain how the mechanism works, but you can’t truly explain how it works.
Go on, look at your finger and wiggle it. Without any conscious thought, you can move your finger. You can look at your finger, and it will move without you thinking. How amazing is that?
You can stretch your hand open and close without any thought. Watch the skin tighten, then relax, tighten, relax.
If you haven’t done it yet, seriously, stop reading and move your hand. Ask yourself how you do it because it doesn’t move based on thought. You don’t sit there and think, “Now I’m moving this finger, and now the next, and then this one, and now I’m closing my hand into a fist and opening.” That doesn’t happen. So, go do that for a minute if you haven’t already, and return to reading once you’ve finished.
That right there is amazing, and it’s the tiniest fraction of what makes life truly amazing.
This Is Why Life Isn’t Truly Amazing
You’re too caught up in nonsense to notice life.
That’s it.
You are surrounded by life’s awesomeness but inundated with stress, worry, anxiety, regret, bitterness, anger, resentment, jealousy, and so on…
When you focus on such things, you get tunnel vision, and those problems begin to loom ever larger as you move into them.
This was my issue with depression. I was so focused on all the reasons I couldn’t or wasn’t good enough. There were so many days where I was inundated with insecurity because what if I couldn’t or didn’t live up to my perceived potential?
I got so lost within myself that I couldn’t even recognize a beautiful day anymore.
You may not deal with depression like I did.
I hope you don’t! But what is holding you back from experiencing life to the fullest? What keeps you from entering a state of being awestruck by your surroundings?
When you watch a bird fly, what holds you back from the mesmerizing feat occurring before your very eyes?
Is it normality? You’ve seen it so many times it doesn’t matter anymore? Do you just hate birds?! Joking. I’m just kidding.
Are you so caught up in the rat race and playing the societal game of let’s see who can be better than others or who can win, instead of understanding that those things don’t matter in the grand scheme of life?
If you are, that’s okay. Many people don’t realize they’re trapped in that game because they think it’s the only one to play. However, if you open yourself up to it, you’ll begin to see there’s a larger game at play, one that’s more invigorating and intoxicating than the one most of us have been taught.
Part of the issue with understanding the new game, though, is most people don’t know how to play it. They’re used to all the old rules, the way of thinking and feeling within the paradigm they were indoctrinated into.
As such, you have to teach yourself how to exit that game and play the new one.
It’s like Neo waking up and unplugging from the matrix. At first, it doesn’t make sense. He struggles to rationalize where he is and what’s happening around him. What he thought was real was an invention to distract him from the truth of his reality. Once he finally woke from the lifelong dream, he began to see how the life he had perceived to be real was a hologram, a program to keep him bound to a specific game.
Many times during this game, you might believe worry, and stress are a normal part of life, and while they are indicators of how you may feel about specific situations or circumstances, living there long-term is not normal.
Constantly returning to stress and anxiety is not a normal way to live and is one of the reasons life isn’t truly amazing for you yet.
Replace stress and anxiety with any strong emotion you feel that brings you down; it doesn’t matter. Living in those states is not normal. The good news is you don’t have to keep living there.
When I was dealing with depression and anxiety, I thought that was the world. My paradigm was Depression and Anxiety. If you had tried to convince me that life was NOT that, it would have been difficult because I didn’t know anything else (actually, I did know, I just didn’t remember).
After a very long, arduous journey, I came back to the realization that life is truly amazing. The awe I felt as a kid finally began to return, and a whole new world began to open up.
This doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It doesn’t mean I don’t lose my temper or say something stupid, act out according to commands or wishes from my ego who might be feeling slightly bruised because something happened that was embarrassing, or worry about what might happen in the future. It doesn’t mean I don’t momentarily regret actions or words said or done in the past.
All it means is that I’ve learned how to stop that line of thinking quicker than I’ve ever been able to, which helps me align with the path I want to follow, which is that life is truly amazing. It allows me to recalibrate and pivot in real-time from feeling down about whatever to living in a place of peace and joy at a much quicker rate.
How to Make Life Truly Amazing Every Day
You decide to do it!
That’s it.
It’s your choice to decide whether to live in the mediocrity of spirit or in the fullness of it.
This choice isn’t based on all the bad things that could potentially happen in your life; it’s based on the fact that you get to choose how to go through life.
You can choose suffering, or you can choose equanimity.
Those are your only two options.
When struggling to hold onto this concept as you work towards a truly amazing life, you just need to remember that you’re either going to deal with the pain of the same or the pain of change.
From there, you simply ask which one you prefer.
“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
– Tony Robbins
If you decide to take the leap and begin working to bring about change in your life, be prepared for some rough moments and failure.
I can promise you at least two things from deciding to go on this journey:
- It will get bumpy. You will face challenge after challenge. There will be many moments where you question if the journey is worth it. You may even give up a few times. But all of this is to be expected, and it’s okay. You just get back up and start again.
- Once you’ve gone through what might seem to be the bleakest, blackest tunnel and start to see the light at the end of it and finally emerge on the other side, it will be worth it, 100%, and there will be no going back. There is a small caveat here: Unless you decide to go back.
But this is one of the reasons life is truly amazing…You get to decide, each moment, the life you want to live.
You can be broke right now, hopeless, on the verge of bankruptcy, car repossessed, a foreclosure on your house, barely scraping by, and you can turn that life around to one of abundance. It’s been done countless times by people no different than you and me.
The trick is they decided to create the life they wanted to live.
Here are a few gems I pulled from Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich:
“You have absolute control over but one thing, and that is your thoughts.”
– Napoleon Hill
“There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge. Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”
– Napoleon Hill
“No more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity than is required to accept misery and poverty.”
– Napoleon Hill
“Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds.”
– Napoleon Hill
“Every man is what he is because of the dominating thoughts which he permits to occupy his mind.”
– Napoleon Hill
Life is available. Life is accessible.
The question is, are you going to decide to start living? Are you going to decide that life truly is amazing?
Or will you stick with the status quo you’ve created for yourself and hope for the best?
Remember, it’s ALL in your mind.
If you found reading this short newsletter enjoyable, thought-provoking, or anything else, please consider sharing it with your family, friends, and network.
Don’t forget!
Life is truly amazing.
Josiah
P.S. Go look at your hand…
