ReMindEd   •  August 3, 2017

Life. Alive. Living. Similar words with different applications.

Life: is that which we get when we are born. A life. One life. Just this one. No pressure, huh! And we wonder why that is daunting… Life also refers to the day-to-day journey we are on. Time passing. Days becoming weeks becoming months becoming years… Life also speaks of experiences. Things that happen. Places we go. People we meet. Just that this is to experience life. Life is therefore something that happens. It is objective.

Alive: when something is given life, it is breathing, it is alive. Heart beats, growth and development continually happen, blood pumps through the body. We are alive until we are not. Alive is being here in this life. It’s a state of being. It’s present tense. I am alive. You are alive. Alive means life happens to us; to those that are alive. To experience life is to be alive. Alive is also objective.

Living: is a choice to feel alive not just be alive. Living is a series of choices made over and over, to experience the fullness of what it is to have a life and be alive. It’s embracing the changes, the triumphs, the trials. To choose to see the beauty within the pain, to find the gold in the ashes, to dare to believe things will work out for good and that all will be okay. Living is subjective. It’s a verb. Living looks like something more than just being alive or having life. It’s more than just a human being. Living is a human doing. It’s intentional. It’s a choice. It’s an action.

Being alive is not the goal. Living is.

We all know people who are alive in this life, but who have given up living. Those who are broken by life and have given up putting the pieces back together. Those who fight the night and in doing so sleep away the daylight.

I recently watched a Keanu Reeves movie, ‘To The Bone’, about a young woman walking through anorexia. She describes herself as “no longer a person, but a problem” as her family members place blame and judgment upon her. She speaks of being a “ghost”, alive yet already dead. She talks about giving up on living and seeking death. It is not until she reaches breaking point, or rock bottom, that she makes a decision to choose to start living, after she wakes up and realises she has been given one more day which she thought she wouldn’t have.

One more day…

A lot can happen in a day. Suddenly things could all change. Change most often happens like that; all of a sudden. Things are a certain way…and then…they have changed.

Everything is like it is until the moment it’s not.

We often have more to do with when things change and how they change than we admit. We are not powerless, bending with the wind, dependent upon external things to happen, with a ‘wait and see’ mentality. We can be. But we needn’t be. That kind of life position tends to happen when people don’t want to take responsibility for their lives, when they are so afraid of making a mistake or failing that they avoid making any decisions or trying something new or taking a risk.

A seated position in life, allows life to just happen, and we wonder why we feel out of control, void of goals and unsure of who we are.

“If we don’t take a stand for something, we will fall for anything”, is a quote I heard long ago, and it resonated with me. I don’t want to be falling over, stumbling around, unable to stand on what I believe and who I am.

What are you standing for? What makes you you? What do you care about and what do you do about that? Are you taking responsibility for the direction of your life?

Responsibility: your ability to choose your response. 

It’s all about choice. Intentional living. Clarity of thought. It’s having a freedom mentality which lets you stand in who you are and walk purposefully towards the life you desire, the life you deserve to have.

I wrote this after a conversation with a man who had one negative thought where he doubted who he was. We can all do that sometimes. Just one thought. But because he didn’t challenge the thought with what he’d previously done a lot of work to replace, it continued down that path he’d once been so familiar with, and a couple of hours later, he was flat, depressed and full of fear about a whole range of things he’d already had peace about.

One negative lie stole his peace because he’d not challenged it as untrue and didn’t choose to replace it with new truth.

Complacency. He stepped out of the battlefield of the mind and let an arrow through his shield of truth.

As I said in last week’s blog post, we often need to fight a battle more than once to win it, but battles can be won once-and-for-all. You won’t always be fighting the battle you fight today.

You have a choice to respond or react. Response is intentional. It’s a choice out of who you are. Reacting is unintentional, it’s being led by your subconscious, by your hurt, pain or fear. Reactions come from a choice out of who they are (the person, the situation). When we are strong in who we are, it matters not who they are or what they do. Stand firm. Stand in your truth. Know who you are. Your life longs to be led by you. You were made to lead your on life. You can choose to stay. You can choose to fight for your truth and freedom. You can choose to taking responsibility from this moment on and choose your response to life. Equipped with strategies to stay in control of your mind, acknowledging your your emotions and choosing your behavioural response rather than reacting, you have all you need to work out what you stand for, who you want to be, who you are.

Your life is worth something. You are worth something. You deserve to be alive. You deserve to live. You deserve a great life. People in your life deserve the best version of you. You are deserving. 

Please be encouraged today. Hear the truth. Re-read the passage above outloud, replacing the ‘you’ with ‘me’.

My life is worth something. I am worth something. I deserve to be alive. I deserve to live. I deserve a great life. People in my life deserve the best version of me. I am deserving.

Start today, by speaking that truth over your life every day. Just watch your life start to change towards living as you start to believe it to be true about you. Because it is.

Towards living,

Sal and Harvs

www.reminded.com.au