I can’t lie to you, guys—there’s something deep within me, gnawing away, telling me not to write a blog post tonight. Telling me that there’s things out there in the night that I could be doing instead and to just let it slide this once and go out there and have some fun. I have an event that I’m supposed to be heading out to right now, but here I am, working on getting this post done to make sure I hit my commitment I made this year. But it’s hard—real hard. My id’s pointing in one direction and my conscience in another. What do you do when different parts of your being are pointing in such very different directions?
Sometimes you’ll have your lazy days. The ones where you’re cooling off after those intense weeks of work, lacking the energy to do anything. Sometimes you just need those days to yourself in order to get your mind right and prepare yourself for what’s to come. But what about those times when you’re supposed to be busy, but mysteriously aren’t? Your workload is mysteriously empty, your friends stop asking you to help with anything and your parents seem to rely on your siblings any time they ever need anything. Well, my friends, these are the times where you should worry. While we weren’t built to work ourselves to the bone, it’s better to be busy. We often complain about how busy our lives are, but maybe we’re looking at it all wrong. You’ll hear yourself in your head crying out—”there’s so much to do!” “but you promised her you’d get around to it today!” “you’ve been looking forward to this event for weeks!”
And then, yet another part of you has a soothing voice, veering you away from that daunting list of tasks you know you need to do—”just a few more hours of sleep; that won’t hurt—right?” “it can wait till tomorrow” “who’s going to notice if you don’t do it?”
That’s when you need to ask yourself—how often do you make decisions based on your gut instinct? Do you plunge into new opportunities, or do you hem and haw to make your choices, sometimes letting a prime opportunity slip through your fingers while you measure each and every factor?
We have our gut instinct for a reason. If you talk to a Christian, they’ll tell you it’s because God gave us free will and our instincts are the sum total of all His teachings, allowing us to choose wisely. Talk to an anthropologist and they’ll tell you about our instinct being a result of evolution and our need for survival. Either way, our instinct is meant to be a good thing—something for us to RELY upon rather than something to QUESTION.
Sometimes the things that your gut will tell you to do may seem illogical to many around you, but we’re not built to know what’s in store for ourselves prior to reaching our destinations on life’s journey.
So instead of being clairvoyant, it’s that blind faith we need in order to point us in the right direction. More often than not, a gut decision is the way to go—but don’t get your instinctual voice get confused with that OTHER voice—the spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment voice that’s more likely to get you in trouble than give you ANY sort of guidance.
I’ll admit—they’ll both be the first ones to show up to the party; but the things they say are like night and day. One wants you to succeed, the other wants you to lounge around and do nothing—be just another warm body on the planet, not truly living but merely existing.
So you know what? I think I’m going to get my things together and go out and see what’s up with the world. Only I can live my life, only you can live yours. So get out there and get living!
245/365
