An Important Decision: Stay With The Known Or Dare To Change?
The ability to change is a choice. Deciding implies being able to renounce: comfort, the known … But with that resignation we make ourselves free.
When I have to make decisions I feel a certain fear, until a moment comes, when I think I have found the right decision, when that feeling disappears and I sleep soundly.
There are always things to choose and I always feel fear, but I also feel that I am the one who chooses from my freedom.
I realize that I am tied to the routine of each day, to the point that I have made of it a status, a social position that I have inherited and I have been winning in the choice between one activity or another.
It is about the memory of what I have been and what I am, a comfort zone or my comfortable zone, which is sometimes accompanied by suffering or pain, but which is part of my preferences and marks my choices. However, that status sometimes turns into a golden prison.
The problem when choosing any type of life or life improvement is that it carries a risk, and that risk represents a danger or threat, or a certain discomfort that is difficult to assume. Choosing between what you want always entails a resignation. Whenever I have to choose, I lose something.
Maybe I only win anyway when I don’t choose anything, because I don’t need or want anything. That would be a good state of happiness and freedom: the person feels complete in inaction.
Our education and health are tied to custom. When unhappiness, suffering, degradation or illness is observed from outside or in the consultation, it is sometimes thought that in order to get out of these states it is important to want to leave, to want to get rid of misery, misfortune, illness …
We must understand that many people prefer to remain in their comfort zone: they are so afraid of losing what they have that they do not see how much they could gain by getting rid of it.
We are alive: we can choose to change
We have been brought up in a kind of slavery. We are even told that we are what we have learned and that neurons do not forget or regenerate. However, biology shows the opposite: the brain has plasticity to change and neurons can regenerate.
As long as we are alive we will have desires, sufferings, illnesses, depressions, but also the possibility of getting out of them, of choosing the best despite the circumstances. We know that, even while in prison, we can choose and dream of freedom.
“Who encloses a smile? Who walls a voice?” Said Miguel Hernández. Freedom is not given by others.
It is easy to blame others for our evils and chains, but it does not solve problems : the world changes and improves from our own improvement. As Gandhi used to say: “be the change you want to see in the world.”
Discovering freedom is in part realizing that you can act without adjusting to your own thought patterns and social status. It is also accepting that no one binds us with their capacity for service or need for dependency.
When choosing there will be losses and risks, but it is important to make decisions. Choosing is the first step to advance on the path to freedom.
