Have you been living passively for the last year? For the past year or so, I have been watching the days, weeks and months, fly by without even realizing it. Time has flown by so quickly, and I genuinely cannot tell you where the time went or what even happened. Which got me thinking, what was doing in the past year? Why was I living such a passive existence? What happened to my life? The pandemic presented a strange set of circumstances that were different for each person, and the way we all responded to those circumstances differed as well. Today I want to share how I slowly climbed out of this habit of living life passively to one where I am actively living my life.
For an entire year, I stopped myself from feeling any sort of joy because I thought it was going to be taken away from me. For a year, I held in my grief because it hurt too much to feel anything. For an entire year, I let things happen to me and didn’t even bother reacting. I let life pass me by. Even though it was a horrible year in so many ways, it was still a year of my life. I still passively lived a year of this precious life that I have. Quite honestly, I have reached a point where I do not want that to be who I am or the type of life I live.
So, what changed? A few weeks ago, I reached a point where I was getting sick and tired of my daily routine. It was chaotic, boring, and quite frankly not helping me live my day-to-day life. So, I decided to challenge myself. For three days, I would try hard to create a daily schedule that was balanced, healthy and made me excited to wake up in the morning. For those three days, I made sure to carve out time in my days to do things I know benefit my mental and physical health, but that also allowed me to balance work with hobbies on the side. Was it easy? No. A part of me wanted badly to revert to old ways, and the next week I did. But I also realized how awful I felt living passively after I experienced three days of actually enjoying my life.
Now the question remains, what can you do about it? For one day, try to create a day that makes you truly happy. I am not saying you must ignore work and responsibilities but create a day that makes you feel balanced and happy. Think carefully about how you want this day to look. Think about how you want to feel. I would recommend writing it all done on a list because trust me there is nothing more satisfying than checking things off a list.
Once you have your list of all the little things that you can do in a day that would make you feel full, happy and balanced, it’s time to do it. I don’t have any secret how-to for this part because it’s up to you at this point to decide that you want to try. You wake every single morning and give it all you got, so why not try doing something you like? Take the list and go through it throughout the day and check things off.
I hope that at the end of the day, you feel happy and full. I hope you realize that little things throughout the day can make us feel just as satisfied and happy as the big moments in our lives can.
The secret to actively living your life and not passively going through it is that you must choose to live your life. You must actively choose small tasks or moments throughout your day and fill them with something you love. Living doesn’t have to be going on crazy adventures it can just mean living intentionally and fully.
I hope you take a few months to realize that if you have been on autopilot for the past year or just not happy or disconnected, that it doesn’t have to stay that way. You do not have to watch the rest of the world go on without you. You can be a part of it.
The only way you can create the life you want or the life you dream of is by deciding to live your life.
The Life We Dream Of 