Never complain, never explain
🌞
You get to make choices – it might just be the greatest thing about being alive. The choices you make are yours alone, despite what you might tell yourself. Sure, it’s always a trade-off. Of course, the ability to make a choice doesn’t mean you get everything you want, or even anything. But don’t belittle the fact that you get to choose!
You can choose to act exactly as you wish in any given moment. You can then choose how you will feel about that choice; the implications; the consequences; the outcome that follows; the potential futures it creates. You can choose to lament, regret, undo, or repair. ‘Ever onward’ is another popular choice, along with the very royal ‘never complain, never explain’.
Tell me you didn’t get to choose, that circumstance was thrust upon you, that constraints limited your actions. I will tell you that the truth is more subtle – you wanted to act in a way that was not possible at that point in time; you could not see how to make your desired future real. Remember that you chose desire, that you are choosing to be crushed by fortune.
Here is something I know to be true – you control nothing but how you choose to act and think. The rest is not up to us. This can be a hard thing to accept, but that acceptance may gives you space, where you may revel in the abundant power you actually possess! Try being more mindful of the many micro-choices you make each day. Spend just a little conscious effort on exploring the possible.
Here’s my experiment for the week ahead:
Choose to do one thing that I know to be good
Choose not to do one thing that I do not know to be good
Reflect on how those choices make me feel, how much closer they move me toward an outcome I see as beneficial
Decide what, if anything, needs to change about my choices, my beliefs
‘Good’ and ‘beneficial’ might be topics for another day, but for right here, right now, we each own the definition – it’s another choice 😊
Here are things I’m reading that got me to this choice:
"When you choose the benefits of an action, you also choose the drawbacks…You have to want the lifestyle, not just the outcomes…It's easy to want the rewards, but you also have to want the hidden costs." – James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“What I have is my own. Just as one of small stature can be a perfect man, so a life of small compass can be a perfect life. Age ranks among the external things. How long I am to exist is not mine to decide, but how long I shall go on existing in my present way is in my own control. This is the only thing you have the right to require of me, – that I shall cease to measure out an inglorious age as it were in darkness and devote myself to living instead of being carried along past life.” – Seneca, On the Quality of Life
Finally, I hope that you remember to make time for yourself, try to take care of others, and search for joy in whatever you’re doing. Don’t worry if you don’t find it every day; just keep looking, just do the work – it’ll come.
Cheers,
Kyle
I asked AI what my ‘space’ to make choices from might look like