What are you Waiting for? - Extra Mile Writing

I spent so much of my life waiting for things.

I used to have this terrible passive belief that “everything was going to work out.” I believed that I just had to keep enduring things because I’d be able to look back eventually and smile happily, when everything had worked out.

Embarrassingly, I literally spent over a decade thinking like this.

Toward the end of this period in my life, I started to wonder what I would do in a few more years’ time if I was in fact looking back on a situation where things still hadn’t worked out.

Surely this wouldn’t happen though, I thought? I wasn’t an arsehole (at least not most of the time) and I’d been so patient. Surely it would be my turn soon?

But I did start to consider that I might need to think about what I’d do if things still hadn’t worked out.

Would my heart break?

No, I decided, I’d just grit my teeth and keep going. Because that’s what I always did.

Well, guess what?

It turns out that waiting for years for things to “work out” with no evidence of any positive progress whatsoever wasn’t a good idea.

Things didn’t work out.

And I finally realised amongst lots of messy snotty tears that things were never going to work out.

There wasn’t ever going to be a happy ending.

I had just been doing things all wrong.

And that was the best thing, actually, even though it was horribly painful at the time. Yes, I’d wasted years of my life, but there was nothing I could do about that now. The experiences I’d gone through had made me a more perceptive and compassionate person. I also had a well-developed ability to handle difficult situations and pain, so if nothing else I was good at saying nothing, gritting my teeth and soldiering on. And now at least I could still change my present and my future, and live much better for the remaining years of my life.

I finally had to get up off my bloodied knees, wash my snot stained face and change my life myself.

This was beautiful because I started experiencing the joy of making decisions and acting on them. I started my small business, which has been the most beautiful thing in the world, even though I’ve built it up slowly over many years. Another of those actions eventually led me to split up with my ex, because the action I took unavoidably clarified the fact that we were fundamentally different and wanted different things. And yes, if I’d ever even given this a moment’s thought, it was always blindingly clear that he didn’t want this same key thing that I wanted. I had just been living a brain dead auto pilot existence because things were bad but “everything was going to work out.”

And I have to say, this was a terrible way to live. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

I was resentful, sad and withdrawn. And I could feel the undeniable jealousy inside when I heard about other people’s lives, which grated on me because I’m not a jealous person. I could feel the self-resentment and the resentment I felt for my ex killing me slowly, wearing my body out with stress and making me feel old before my time. My ridiculous passive belief about everything working out also resulted in me staying in the relationship way too long. It would have been so much better for him and me if I’d woken from my auto pilot stupor and given him his freedom many years before I did. He actually asked me why I didn’t end the relationship well before I did.

Anyway, luckily since then I’ve experienced first-hand how awesome self-determination is. Saying to yourself, “I want this and I’m going to take the steps I need to take to achieve it” is a beautiful thing.

It’s what life is all about really.

As Jewish Holocaust Survivor Eddie Jaku says in his amazing book The Happiest Man on Earth, “Don’t blame others for your misfortunes. No one has ever said that life is easy, but it is easier if you love it. If you hate your life, it becomes impossible to live.”

It turns out that passively waiting for your life to magically become what you want it to be leads directly to blaming others and then hating your life, which truly does make your life impossible to live.

The worst thing is, there was no need for this. I had the personal power to achieve the goals I wanted to achieve. I didn’t need to blame anyone for anything. Everything really was all there laid out for me to take.

And as Laurence Overmire says, “The world we create is a reflection of ourselves. Change yourself and change the world.” When I finally started taking action to make things happen I was no longer stuck in sad auto pilot, I was happier and able to give more to others and to do more for causes that were important. I experienced the beautiful liberation of casting off resentment and the torrid awfulness of blaming other people and I got my personal energy back.

I was back in the ring and I’d come out swinging.

I finally re-discovered my spirit and the fight in my soul.

This has been the most beautiful feeling that I’ve ever experienced.

So in summary, if you’re reading this and you feel like you’re waiting passively for anything in your life, don’t do what I did. Go out and get what you want because you have the God given right and the power to do this all by yourself. Please don’t waste the amount of years that I wasted in self-resentment. Deep down we all know that we have control over everything in our lives. We don’t need to wait for things, to ask for permission from anyone else to do things we want to do, or to even believe our own bullshit about being “too busy” to do something we know we need to do.

We can just do it, and honour our unique and amazing soul by doing so.

If you’re looking for another article on this topic, I highly recommend the article Stop Waiting for Permission to Live the life you Want to Live by Jennifer Bardall at Tiny Buddha.

Finally, I’d like to end with an awesome quote from John Kreiter in the The Art of Transmutation:

“I am someone who has stepped through the door, someone who has accepted the possibility of a life beyond routine and self-misery. I have accepted the challenge of life and I now see it as something that must be overcome. I challenge you, young man, to see the weight and measure of life, to look for the places in between here and there, and to try and battle against that devil that screams in your head, that devil that wants to make you take the easy path, that makes you want to hate yourself and the world, that wants to make you think that somehow you are special in your struggles and in your fate. Wake up boy, or the only thing that you will ever find at the end of all your routine and self-misery, is your death.”