Go Be The Damn Thing

Isn’t it odd how we’re taught to be scared of losing the things we don’t really want?

It is, but it’s not because we know exactly what we’ll lose. But we can’t quite see what we’ll gain on any given day. For that we need faith. And faith can be tricky…

But loss? Well, loss is easy.

We see the job we don’t like and we feel the impact of its paycheck each week. We can imagine not having money to pay our bills or buy food. We picture losing our car and our house, our clothes or our spouse. We have a relationship that doesn’t fulfill us and yet we feel more comfortable together instead of alone, so we keep our pain close because breaking up means being solo and that feels scary and uncertain. Besides, we prefer pain we know to pain we don’t.

We live in a house we hate but know so well. We keep the car we despise but are so scared to sell. We know EXACTLY what we stand to lose, and losing them means removing part of ourselves.

It’s an identity crisis.

We see part of ourselves in our car, our job, our partner, our house, and to give up on that means that we give up a piece of us, a piece of who we are. And this hurts because we falsely believe that we are these things. For many of us who identify our stuff as who we are, that feels like a tragedy to avoid. Even though we know we’ll be better off without those things, we don’t take action because, right now, we can’t feel what ‘better off’ might feel like. And if we can’t feel it, we can’t know it. And if it’s unknown, we avoid it.

We can’t touch what we don’t have. The promotion. The dream relationship. The purpose. The paycheck. Ease. Acceptance. All of the things we want to be and become, but have never felt. We’ve never had what we don’t have, so we don’t know what it feels like to get it. And if we don’t know the feeling, the impulse is to fear it. Because if it’s uncertain or unknown, it’s scary. And fuck scary, right?

But, in the space between ‘what if’ and ‘what is’ there lies a ‘maybe’ a ‘just might’ and a ‘what could be’. There lies possibility, and that’s where the leap lives. That’s where chance hatches – in the risk, a hunch of intuition leading to decision, a spark of opportunity to be brave in the face of change.

And when nothing is known, anything is possible. So dream big and believe, because both are just choices for us to decide what and who we want to be. And when we make the decision, the rest is easy. We just go out into the world, and go be the damn thing.