“what you truly love and how you love it is impossible to put into words”
7 Minute Read
People are going to try and tell you what to do your entire life.
They’re going to tell you to go to school, get a safe job, get married, have some kids, save for retirement. None of this is bad at all. It just may not connect with what makes you happy as a person. If that sounds like you, this next part is the most important thing you may ever read.
Your perceived success and triumphs are complete bullsh*t if you aren’t happy. It doesn’t matter if you have all the money in the world, if you can’t sit back, stop working, and just enjoy the cool breeze or the rain or the sun or whatever the weather is, then you aren’t fulfilling your life and need to re-evaluate your sh*t.
That’s what matters. Fulfillment. If you don’t have that, then life is utterly pointless. You will not feel ecstatic and passionate and playful and creative if you don’t have fulfillment.
Life is supposed to be filled with emotion, good and bad, and to have another person tell you what direction your life should head down without giving you any say in the discussion is a terrible circumstance. If that sounds like you, get out of your situation. I don’t care what you have to do. If you have to live in a motel for 6 weeks until you make enough money for an apartment, so be it. DON’T LET OTHER PEOPLE LIVE YOUR LIFE FOR YOU!!
That is the message here. I will reconnect it back to gratitude in just a second, which is the key point to this article and life, for that matter. But for right now, I have a very special tangent that I want to talk about. This will play more prominence in the video I’m going to make along with the post, talking about why this is such an important topic. As I’m sure many of you will know by now, Billie Eilish came out with a new single this last week, entitled: “my future”. This was a ridiculously good song, regardless of the impact that it had on me and my friends emotionally. There was one line in particular that struck a rather incredible cord with me: “Know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone, but aren’t I someone?”
People are going to tell you that you need to have a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a partner, because that will make you happy. WAIT. What? That is horsesh*t. Completely wrong. If you are feeling down on yourself right now because other people are dating and you’re not, or maybe you want to be in a relationship purely to be in a relationship, let me tell you right now, it won’t make you happy. It may satisfy your emotions for a week, or 2, or even a month, but eventually, you will realize that there is an internal struggle happening. Deal with that first. You don’t have to find yourself, or some other hippie crap like that, but you need to find what makes you happy on this planet and pursue that, learn, get better at that thing and then you will find yourself so f*cking happy, so much happier than if you went and went on 4 dates with someone who you don’t even like that much.
There are probably dozens of her lyrics, or other artist’s lyrics that were more impactful than that, but this line resonated with me more than you could possibly know. The entire notion of people trying to boss you around and get you to follow in the path of every lower or middle class person before them, as I explained above(job – career – wife/husband – kids – retirement – death) resonates within this lyric.
Gratitude is not something you will find doing what makes other people feel safe and secure inside, even if they may believe they have chosen the best path for you, the path of least resistance. I want you to ask yourself something right now. Are you happy? Not in some, stupid, superficial way. Are you truly, unequivocally happy? With zero regrets? Nothing that you could’ve done differently? Could’ve tried? Could have met that beautiful woman or man? Could have traveled to Italy or Germany or France or Hawaii or the Caribbean or a hundred other places reserved for people who put themselves first.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what gratitude is. Putting yourself first. You have to be selfish in a way. Selfish for your goals, for your dreams. Selfish enough to say, no the path I am on is not the easiest one, but I am following my dreams, my goals, my passions, my love in this world which we are on for an inconceivably short amount of time.
Short enough to make you question what the purpose of this place really is.
I’ve figured some of that out. Not all of it. I probably will never figure out the entire reason we’re on this place called Earth in a galaxy where there is apparently no life for billions of miles. Really? If that’s the case, then we can’t worry about grand stuff like that, you have to focus on you. You have to focus on what makes you passionate, what makes you wake up in the morning, what takes you from being someone who is tired, stressed, worried, and fearful of rejection to someone who is playful, passionate, interested in learning new things, creative, and not afraid to take a different path even though everyone is telling you to stay on the safe path, with the safe wife/husband, with the safe job, and the safe career, and the safe 401K. It’s a bunch of ******. There is not a curse word that has been developed yet to fully describe the type of anger I feel when I think about people staying on their present course.
So, what does gratitude really mean? And why does it result in living your life on your own terms?
Gratitude is freedom. Freedom from the shackle holds of the world, trying to keep a firm grip on your arm and not let you do what you want to do. Here’s my otherworldly advice: Be you. Don’t play on the whims of someone else. Even if they love you dearly, they aren’t you. They don’t understand the fire that burns inside of you. They couldn’t possibly because what you truly love and how you love it is impossible to put into words elegant enough to describe what you love.
I know. I’ve been there. I am there. Myself, I love to train my body, my mind, and my creative side. You may be something completely different. GO GET THAT SH*T. Whatever it is. Whatever it may become. Don’t follow in the path of least resistance. That leads to anxiety, suffering, depression. Do you and be you. Love each and every one of you. Keep pursuing whatever it is that makes that fire burn inside of you and don’t stop for anyone.
And, if anyone ever asks you what the true purpose of gratitude is, direct them to this post.
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