The moment you don’t decide

When we feel that we are not getting enough out of life – that neither our work lives or leisure time are giving us any reward – it’s time to take a look at how we allocate our priorities. How do we spend our time? Are we being overwhelmed by the demands of work? Do we have plans for doing something meaningful with our time but never get past thinking about it?

We plan our work time. We know if we don’t plan we won’t get enough done. So why don’t we plan to fit important leisure activities into our day? If we plan to take a walk along a mountain trail we feel that we have achieved something. If we watch re-runs of Seinfeld for the tenth time because it involves not moving much, we have just succumbed to inertia.

When you look back on your life, what kind of moments would you rather look back on? The inertia moments or the planned mountain trail moments?

If you are overwhelmed by the things that you have to do like taking the kids to soccer practice, maybe you need to cut down on some of these things. This is a very important time in finding out the truth in your life because sometimes the things we consider to be drudgery turn out to be things that we feel are really important. So the best thing we can do when we are trying to plan our lives is to ask ourselves if we are getting our direction from our own desires and aspirations or are we just reacting to cues from our environment.

Our culture is telling us the things that are cool and if we don’t really want those things then we are making ourselves sick trying to conform.

This video shows how we all succumb to the forces exerted by our surroundings. What we see is a contrived experiment illustrating peer pressure but we are given the opportunity all the time to choose a course of action and we usually let inertia do our thinking for us.