When I had my heart attack in 2005, I had a thought after I was back home from the hospital. What if I had died, but had come back to life somehow? What if my old life had completely ended, and I could live in a new way outside of all the constraints of my old life.
It is an interesting thought process, because we often create the constraints in our life or we just accept those placed upon us. But these constraints don’t have to be there. We don’t have to keeping going to our old job. We don’t have to do the same things on the weekends. We don’t have to live in the same old neighborhood. And we don’t have live according to everyone else’s expectations.
The Checkout Counter
I think for many of us, our life is like the checkout counter at the grocery story. You know, the one where you load up the items on the conveyor belt for the checker to ring up? For us, things get put on the “conveyor belt” of our life by others and our circumstances and we “process” these things. Our life has a whole slew of things flowing in it. And most of our life is just us reacting and responding to these things.
These things include our work that we go to 40+ hours a week, requests from family, requests from our friends, our home that we must keep up, car maintenance, and things we feel like we should do such as volunteering, and people to visit with. We’re just trying to keep our heads above water.
When we live this way, we aren’t being proactive. Even if we get upset and decide we’re going to “get proactive” and do something about it, we’re still just reacting to external influences. We are letting others and circumstances set the agenda for our day, week, month, year, or even our whole life.
Get Proactive, Really
To really get proactive, we need a whole new approach. Being proactive is about taking back control over our life. We need to start ignoring some of those things on our “conveyor belt” so that we can start moving our life in a new direction.
One of the key ways of doing this is to set and write down goals. When we start setting goals and work towards them, we are doing something outside of what’s flowing onto our “conveyor belt.”
We need to work towards these goals even though there are distractions and crisis in our life. Sure, maybe we’ll put the goals on hold for a bit, but we pick them back up as soon as the crisis is over. This way instead of just doing what flows into our life, we get to pursue meaningful endeavors that really matter.
What if we decided that our old life was dead and we instead lived without the constraints that we let others place on us and we place on ourselves? What would this look like? How much more could we truly love people? How much more would our life matter?
This type of proactive living is, of course, what we want for your life. Let us know how we can support you.
