We don’t often ask ourselves what our ideal life would look like. We amuse ourselves with thoughts of “this would be cool” or “I bet I’d enjoy that because…”, but we don’t put much thought into how we would construct an ideal lifestyle. One of the main reasons for this is because we are thinking and operating under false constraints. Our thought process is limited because we feel the need to subscribe to commonly held beliefs and principles, which in many cases comes from a place of self protection, not wanting to do away with people’s opinions of the lifestyle you have created for yourself.
If you have ever been completely enraptured by something – a landscape, playing an instrument or a sport, a person, etc. – you know that there are states where the opinion of others and the basic premises we operate under simply don’t exist. Not that they don’t exist indefinitely, but that their presence or lack thereof have no implications on your health or happiness. These states are what we should build our life upon, where our regular stressors are seen in their true light and where we have a simpler, less clouded view of reality.
In examining how we want our life to look and the story that we want it to tell, we first have to drop all our pre-existing conditioning. We need to detach from our patterns and shake things up in order to return to a baseline from which we can plan for something that makes sense to us, logically or perceptually.
When we strip away everything we feel we need to survive and simply add in the essentials of life, we can come to a better understanding of a lifestyle cost-benefit analysis. We will better value our time and our energy, and the stakes to forgo our peace and freedom – freedom from worry, deadlines, expectations, or otherwise – will have to be that much more significant if they were to persuade us to change our ways.
We’re inclined to solve problems by addition from years, literally a lifetime, of practice. If gradually subtracting from life proves to be too difficult, a complete reset can also work, even if only temporarily.
There is simply too much at stake to just coast through life without questioning the “why” behind our actions, especially when the answers to our questions are completely accessible right now; We just need to be willing to hear them.