Agree With All That You Do

How brave are we supposed to be in life? Sometimes I feel like I’m not brave enough.

When I look back, I feel like I used to be so much braver. Braver to not just take the plunge but to swim around for a while. Braver to perhaps never even get out.

I made so many decisions that made me who I am today; go vegetarian, move to California, go to photography school, get a puppy, fall in love, live on my own, attempt financial freedom before I’m even ready, find a new and mysterious relationship with God, spontaneously say yes when it’s safer to say no, create a close friend out of a stranger with a ‘hi’…

In the present, I often feel like I’m not being brave enough. I feel like my choices look so small. But the truth is, in every milestone I make, I never feel brave enough. I feel like each step I take feels so small in comparison to the leaps I could take. But how often do we properly gauge our own actions? It can be difficult to see the magnitude of our choices in the midst of making them, but in hindsight we can appreciate even the babiest of steps to land us to where we are in the present. How do we learn to appreciate them now?

I ask myself this all the time and have been struggling to force present appreciation for my choices and my youth and life in it’s current standing, but I continue to fall short.

I wish I knew the answer to my own question. But I fear as human beings it’s something that has to be self-taught. Something we must learn to do on our own. To learn to be eternally and continuously grateful for our own personal strides that morph us into what’s to come. We have to stop looking at what we’ve done to become who we are, and focus on what we’re doing today to become who we will be tomorrow. We must learn to congratulate ourselves, pat ourselves on the back, for what we decide today. For our seemingly meek but meaningful bravery today.

It comes back to faith. Having faith in ourselves, trusting ourselves, to make decisions that could result in an ocean of outcomes, but to truly believe in ourselves—back ourselves up when no one else will, perhaps when everyone else is…everyone but our own number one fan, our inner self.

Because at the end of the day, no one else completely understands the inner workings of our brain like we do. No one else is in our head. No one else hears every unfiltered thought. Exposing those thoughts to others can compromise the original reasoning behind a developing choice, causing a reevaluation that can counteract what we truly want.

We all deserve what we want. No one, no one, should prohibit what we want in life. We all deserve our desires. You should agree with all that you do.