Life bending: Bend the course of your life
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2021-01-03

The idea of changing my life, the idea that my life is not what I want it to be: that is behind why I started this channel, this project, to try to find a way to make my life closer to how I want it to be, how I imagine it to be.
And I know this is a feeling that many people have had, that we sort of expect the future to be different.
We have this idea of how life might be in the future.
But as time goes by, we find that that future is not becoming reality.
Now of course, things will always change no matter what, but there's nothing to say that they'll change in the direction that we want.
And so we get time going by without things moving in a good direction.
And so that's when I had to eventually decide, like, if I'm going to live a life that I want, I'm going to have to make deliberate actions and make deliberate changes myself, and not simply trust that whatever will happen will happen.
Of course, that's also part of life as well.
We can't completely change everything.
It's always a mix of our own decisions and what's going on around us, our situation.
So we can't just like program it out of nowhere, out of nothing, like creating a fictional character for an imaginary world.
We can't just like create everything out of nothing.
We have to respond and live within the environment that we're in.
But within that, there's a lot of room for us to make decisions to choose how we want to live our lives.
And that's really the idea of this channel, is to support that idea of making changes to make our lives what we want.
So that's still ongoing for me, and it's been a few years now that I've had this mentality, and my life has gotten better, but there's still a long way to go, and a lot of things that I want to change.
And it's an ongoing thing to bring my life closer to what I imagine to be the life that I want.
So when I think about this process, I like to think of the idea of bending.
The word "bending" seems to fit very well.
So the idea of bending is we're moving in a certain direction, we're living a certain way, and that's almost like a course that we're on, with its own momentum, because there's the momentum of habit, the momentum of the way we've always done things.
And so that really can be imagined like we're on a course.
We're moving in a certain direction.
There are various ways to, you know, you have the mental experiment, the thought experiment, to imagine you're somebody else and imagine there's no past and future, and these different ways of kind of getting that restart and clicking into that new way of looking at things, to try to let go of that momentum, and so that can be very useful.
But I haven't been able to just- I don't find that I can just completely just like snap my life into a completely new mindset, a completely new direction automatically.
There is that momentum there.
And the idea of bending is that every day we just slightly alter the course of our life.
We can't make everything just change.
There are ways to try to jump start that, and to shock the system with big changes, but overall, if we just make little adjustments every day, it's like we're bending the course of our life.
And at first, it seems to be almost nothing.
There's almost nothing changed, and it's so difficult to bend the course when there's a lot of momentum going in a particular direction.
But once we start to make several of these little bends, day after day, then we can start to notice that we're on a slightly adjusted course, and there's just something different about our lives.
And that becomes the new momentum that it's automatic for us to start to live in that way.
And then we can just simply continue applying this idea of bending in what we think is a good direction.
So to help guide this movement, we have some kind of a vision of the life that we want.
Imagine.
Sometimes it's hard to put into words, it's not clear.
Maybe sometimes it just comes, just these sort of sensations and just sort of ideas, things that inspire us, things that we saw and we thought "Oh wow, I want that part of my life."
These kind of visions, they become guides that we kind of bend towards.
We try to somehow adjust something in our life to make it closer to that vision that we have.
And we can continue to do this every day. [...]
So once I have this view, once I start to see things this way, the other advantage is that it becomes kind of fun. [...] If you feel that you're you're bending towards something good, then in a sense, it's almost like you're already there, because you already feel that you're moving towards what you want.
And everything in life is about change.
There's never just sort of sitting in a permanent state.
And so as long as we're moving towards the good, then I believe that life is good.
So I'd love to hear your perspectives on this way of looking at life.

#bendlife #changelife #newlife