If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re the kind of person who wants to have a positive impact.
Chances are, you’re the kind of person who wants to make the world a better place for others, and who also really wants to make your own world a better place.
I’m willing to bet that part of the reason why you clicked on this article, why you may watch the videos posted here and why you may be interested in content like this at all, is because you have a desire to live a life that feels good to you - and you’ve come to see (or maybe have always seen) that how *most* people are living their lives really doesn’t feel good/work for you.
There’s a good chance that you look around at the world and see SO much chaos. You see violence. You see destruction. You see pollution and waste. You see people being horrible to one another. You see suffering and you see power imbalances being used in a way that really hurt and harm.
There’s a good chance that you have things in your own life that are causing you pain, things that you struggle with, choices that you’re making that you know are causing you pain and patterns that you have that DO lead you to suffer - and in that you are finding it hard to change, hard to make new patterns and are struggling to find a way of life that aligns with what you KNOW you want to be doing.
There’s a good chance that you’ve tried all sorts of different things to try to ‘fix’ yourself and to try to fix the world. Maybe you’re a self help junkie who’s tried all the tools offered to help you change your mindset, uplevel your habits, shift your way of communicating - all in the hopes that you will become a ‘new and improved you’ that can feel how you want to feel.
Perhaps you’ve taken yourself on a few spiritual quests - trying your best to learn to meditate or journal or connect with God in some way that you hoped would shift the way that you feel and the way that you live.
Maybe you’re the activist type that’s gone out and protested, boycotted, posted on social media and done your best to shift the system by learning about it and then working to change it in whatever way you felt was available to you.
Maybe you’re really WANTING to do the above mentioned things, but finding it hard to actually motivate yourself.
Maybe you’ve read all the books and taken all the courses and done all the healing sessions and tried your very best to improve what you feel is wrong with you that’s causing you pain and to try to shift the world around you - and you’re finding that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much effort you put in, no matter how much you believe that ‘this time’ things are going to be different - you end up repeating your patterns, getting burnt out on trying, becoming disillusioned and discouraged and generally just struggle to actually get yourself to FEEL or BE different in your life in some sort of sustainable and lasting way.
It’s likely that there’s a part of you that believes that there must be something fundamentally broken about you with all of this. There must be some weakness you have, some character flaw, some moral failing that’s stopping you from reaching your potential and that’s stopping you from sticking to any ‘good habits’ you try to shift to.
Perhaps you feel like you must simply have limited power to make a difference and that maybe the answer is to just give up and surrender to the end of the world as we know it.
Maybe you’re here because you’re hoping that there’s some secret that you’re missing, some trick to the trade that you’re not seeing and you’re believing that in perusing this article and the other materials here, that you’re going to find that secret ticket that’s going to help you live in a way that feels good for you AND makes the world around you a better place.
If this is you, I’m going to let you down easy, and then I’m going to fill you with some genuine hope.
This article likely won’t be what you WANT it to be, but it may set out on a path that’s actually going where you want to go.
It may not be ‘the answer’ that you’re looking for, but it may help you find what direction you need to be walking in, and it may help you release some of the pressure you’re currently putting on yourself that NEEDS to be released if you want to find a life path that really works for you.
It is TOTALLY possible to make a positive impact and it is totally possible to change habits and behaviors in a concrete way that allows us to live better lives sustainably.
But the answer to the ‘how’ of that is likely not what you want it to be - but if you’re willing to embrace the reality of it, it WILL take you where you want to go.
The Answer Is…
First things first - there is no secret.
There’s no secret to getting ourselves on-track in terms of making good choices that serve us when we have a pattern of doing things that can and do cause harm.
There’s no secret to making a positive impact and aligning all of our actions with how we want the world to function.
There’s no secret to living a life that ALWAYS feels good, where we feel totally empowered and like we’re doing the ‘right things’ in all areas at all times.
For many of us, the first and most important step we need to take on this path of finding a life that feels good for us where we also feel like we’re having a positive impact is to accept that perfection doesn’t exist.
There are always going to be things in our days and weeks that don’t feel aligned.
There are always going to be things that we do and participate in that aren’t ideal and that don’t lead to the world we want to see.
There are always going to be contradictions between what we know would be absolutely IDEAL for us in terms of our daily choices and the things we ACTUALLY do.
There will always be a level of discord in the reality that we live because life is complex and finding perfection simply isn’t possible.
It’s not you. You’re not failing or weak or not trying hard enough.
You’re existing on a planet where doing what’s right isn’t always available.
You’re living in a society that is set up in a way that makes it totally impossible to live a harmless life where you participate in no systems of oppression and where all of your choices are perfectly ethical.
You live in a culture where ‘fitting in’ and finding community often means that we have to do things that aren’t 100% ideal for our health and wellbeing - if we want to have a social life AND we want to be well, we’re going to find that there’s a constant tug-of-war going on in terms of how we balance that.
This is the reality that most of us need to embrace so that we can come into our actual power.
You’re not going to perfect yourself, you’re not going to perfect your life, you’re not going to be 100% ‘on-track’ all the time in every area forever and ever.
We’re all going to get triggered by things. We all have our childhood baggage that draws us into coping mechanisms. We all want to be included and feel loved and therefore have to abandon what’s fully healthy in order to go along. We all have our blind-spots. We all have our logistical challenges that make living in total alignment difficult or impossible.
We all exist in a society that’s based on competition, exploitation, greed and general harm and this means that no matter what we choose to buy, what we choose to participate in, what we choose to support - there will always be some element of that which isn’t ideal involved in what we’re doing.
Perfection simply isn’t an option.
Because society and life aren’t set up in a way that would support that.
So we ALL can stand to benefit from giving ourselves some space, and letting ourselves off the hook of trying to create a life where we never make any choices that cause us harm and where we’re constantly in a state of moving towards making society better as a whole.
We live in a world that’s not set up for this and no matter how dedicated we are as individuals, we have to remember that we exist in the context of a family history that wasn’t perfect, a body that isn’t perfect, a working environment that isn’t perfect, a social structure that isn’t perfect and a society that isn’t perfect.
We don’t have total control over our circumstances and even over the choices that are available to us, nor do we have total control over how far those ‘good choices’ can actually take us when we do make them.
THIS is reality.
Can you make room for the idea that there will always be hypocrisy in your actions, discord in your routines, unideal habits and ways of being that don’t feel the best?
If so, you’re on the right track.
How Do We Find The Balance?
From here, the most practical and important step we can take in terms of setting ourselves up for success in creating habits that DO feel good for us and in being the kind of people who ARE having a positive impact on the planet is to realize that we are only going to be able to do so much at a time - and making that ok.
It’s to realize that when we are making changes in our own lives, when we are trying to shift habits that we’ve had for a long time or are working towards creating a life that feels good - we need to understand that we didn’t arrive where we are with the habits we have for no reason.
We need to really take a step back and give ourselves the space to process the fact that we exist with a family history that was likely imperfect and that caused us some level of harm that we are going to have to work through and where we’re going to have to clean up messes that we didn’t make.
We need to realize that we exist in a social system that normalizes self harm and one where ‘fitting in’ generally requires that we consume substances that are unideal, where we engage in activities that go outside of what’s optimal for our mental and physical health, where most people don’t know how to communicate in healthy ways and where being truly authentic and vulnerable is often frowned upon and not supported.
We don’t live in a context where making ideal choices also equals being able to be socially connected and loved a lot of the time and this is REALLY challenging.
We don’t live in a world where healthy choices are the norm - and that makes them REALLY hard to make. Because we are beings who evolved to thrive within a community. We are beings that deeply crave social connection and that actually NEED that social connection to feel safe and supported - and fitting in is a huge part of how we find that social connection.
So pretty much all of us are going to come to realize at some point that doing what’s right and doing what’s popular are almost always at odds with one another.
Now, it’s totally possible to find people who are also striving to live well that we can relate to that make making better choices easier. This is not to say that *everyone* is living a totally toxic life and that being ‘on-track’ means that you have to totally isolate yourself.
It’s just to say that there is always going to be a level of having to compromise somewhere - and this is hard for us to accept but very important that we DO accept.
As we accept this, we then need to realize that it’s likely going to be a constant re-adjusting and re-assessing where our boundaries are, what our needs are and what serves us best in terms of sticking to what we know works best for us and doing what we need to do to feel well and being involved in a social world that asks us to step outside of those routines.
There’s no right or wrong answer here - and that’s the big kicker. There’s no perfect way and there’s no correct way.
There’s only what YOU are capable of holding and doing.
Learning to do what feels right for you even when you’re judged and misunderstood and even when society doesn’t mirror your choices back to you is HARD - so we must have grace and compassion for ourselves as we work through figuring out what balance looks like for us.
Then with that, we have to recognize that we all grew into our adulthoods with habits and ways that we adapt to pain and process through challenges that aren’t ideal.
Most of us weren’t taught how to properly process our emotions. We weren’t taught how to problem solve and really find solutions to the pain we’re in. Many of us were deeply harmed in our upbringing in ways that created patterns in our adulthood that are very much NOT ideal and are very, very difficult to change.
Many of us have a foundational belief that not being able to live a totally healthy, productive life means that we’re failures on some level - but the truth is, it means that we learned to adapt to life in ways that made sense to us as children and that aligned with the resources, tools, awareness and skills we had while we were developing. Which I’m willing to bet weren’t ideal.
So again, changing our habits in adulthood means that we’re going to have to go on a journey of processing what we’ve been through, having compassion for ourselves that our habits have been developed for a REASON - and we’re going to have to realize that changing deep-seated patterns and mindsets is just going to take time. It’s going to take effort. It’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be a one step process.
Check out my youtube channel for LOTS of videos on this and how you can start to support yourself in changing.
Finally, again, we have to really make friends with the idea that we exist within an imperfect societal context.
We don’t live in the supportive, safe and functional communities that we need to exist in in order to fully thrive.
We don’t have the perfect access to healthy food, access to nature time, work environments that are supportive of a proper work/life balance, perfect security and the knowing that if something goes wrong we have a social safety net that’s there to catch us.
We don’t have people in positions of leadership that are fully ideal and that make rules and laws that actually serve the most amount of people.
We don’t have an equitable society.
Rather we have competition, a marketplace that is founded on the insecurity we all feel and that sells us things based on the fact that we feel terrible about ourselves, a social structure that basically demands that we hide our true selves in order to be loved and accepted by others, an exploitative upper class that really DOES impact the choices all the rest of us are capable of making and so on.
We’ve talked a LOT about the social determinants of health around here and how our society and culture simply don’t support us all having a healthy life.
So again, we need to be realistic in terms of the impact we can have.
We need to be realistic in terms of the time, energy and resources we have to pour into causes that matter to us.
We need to realize that we are up against a mammoth of social factors that make making ethical decisions in our personal lives and that makes advocating for better systems generally, really, really challenging.
Not impossible, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination.
So we don’t want to give up and say it’s impossible.
But we DO want to give ourselves grace for the fact that we aren’t set up to have 100% success in creating a perfect life for ourselves or for anyone around us.
We aren’t set up to be able to make all ethical, healthy choices at all times.
We can only do our best.
THIS is the real secret we need to embrace, if we’re going to live a life that does incrementally get better and where we are making a positive impact.
We have to focus on the long term. We have to focus on the small changes that add up over time. We have to be realistic about the CONTEXT in which we are living and we must make our choices to improve and change from THAT understanding.
We’re never going to get it perfect.
We don’t have the power to do that.
We can do better.
We can work towards better. We can learn tools of self support. We can take steps in healing. We can advocate for what we are capable of advocating for while knowing that there will always be contradictions within that.
If we remove the idea that perfection is possible or required - THEN we can settle into reality.
A life of BETTER is the life we want to go for.
Not a life of perfection.
Not a life of doing it all right.
Not a life of being on track and 100% ethical all the time.
Rather a life where we just take STEPS in a better and better direction - knowing that set-backs, step backs and learning phases are going to be a part of this.
Embracing the messiness, embracing that we exist in context and going forward from there.
You CAN create BETTER - it just requires a lot of patience, compassion, two steps forward, one step back and being realistic about the context you exist in and what’s possible for you due to that.
Compassion, compassion and more compassion.
One step at a time.
THAT’S how we do better for ourselves and the planet.
<3
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