What Happens If You Don’t Give Up?
“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
We have all met those kinds of people, the empty shell people. They seem normal enough, but there is something missing.
You wonder what happened to them? You wonder what made them stop trying? You wonder when they lost that thing, that spark, that drive, but you know somewhere along the line they gave up.
Maybe, they started telling themselves that story about how life doesn’t work out for them. And once they started telling themselves that story, they’ve never been the same ever since. Or maybe they gave up on something important and deep down inside they regret it everyday.
After a few disappointments and regrets, it's natural to start telling ourselves that story. After a lot of disappointments and failures it’s natural to give up on that thing you've been trying to make happen in your life. You begin to fear that you don’t have what it takes and you tell yourself that this is as good as it’s ever going to get.
Maybe you give up on yourself in some small way and you tell yourself its no big deal.
Or maybe you give up on something seemingly too big for you to ever have, maybe you decide to give up on finding real love and you tell yourself relationships are hard and people suck.
Maybe you give up on ever feeling fulfilled or figuring out what it is you really want to do with your life, because so far everything you’ve tried ends up falling short.
It seems that thing you've been wanting for so long will always be just outside your grasp, and it begins to feel like mission impossible to have, achieve, receive, or be content.
Most of us never bridge the gap between the life we aspire to lead and the life we are currently living.
We get caught up in that story we keep telling ourselves. Most of us get stuck in the gap because there is a huge gravitational pull to the familiar and we don’t realize that giving up, isn't just a one time choice, it's a choice we continue to make over and over again every time we tell ourselves that story.
I’d spent most of my adult life trying make something of myself, and get as far away as possible from my humble beginnings and the small town I had grown up in. And I guess I’d managed to do that considering I was living in about 2,780 miles away from the place I was born and my seemingly perfect urban life was a far cry from my rural roots.
Then one day there was a wake up call and I looked around and everything seemed to be a little less like what I thought, there was a certain energy in my life that was missing. And I wondered what had happened to me?
After seeking myself for so many years, I came to find out that the thing I was seeking had been there all along, buried deep inside, in that place I had locked away after all those disappointments and regrets.
As adults, we learn to protect ourselves, emotionally, by giving up. We keep ourselves safe by denying that impulse within that is urging us to keep going and keep hoping long after we should have given up.
But life has a funny way of bringing us back to our roots and reminding us of where we came from and who we dreamed we’d be some day. Life always seems to come full circle, it’s as much a cliché as it is an evident truth.
The more I have surrendered to the ebb and flow of my life, and let go of the need to know why things happen the way that they do…. the more meaning and purpose has been revealed to me in the unfolding of things.
Perhaps this is the greatest human experience, to learn to trust that by following your heart and remaining open, you will receive everything you need, and become everything you were always meant to be.
The stories that unfold in our lives have such intricate and subtle beauty if we allow ourselves to open to the experience of living, instead of judging ourselves based on where we think we should be, or who we think we should be in our lives.
The experience of fulfillment, of finding yourself, and experiencing your dreams coming true, isn't about getting what you want, it is in learning to love who you are, and what you’ve got and where you are, right here, right now without having to go, do, or be anything else.
“Sometimes your idea of who you should be gets in the way of who you really are.”
