Consider your life right this moment. What you did today. What your last weekend consisted of. Where you’re sitting. Are you happy?

Not the momentary, fleeting “happy” of endorphins, or “I just ate, so duh,” or even “today was a pretty good day” kind of feeling. I mean are you satisfied thinking of where you stand right now in life, what you’re spending time on, the relationships you’re nurturing, and the mental and emotional space you’re cultivating?

If in 5 years, you still are where you stand today in all these aspects, would you be happy? 10 years? 30 years?

If your answer is no, you need to make a change. Like, PRONTO. You’re dying, in fact, as you read this, so the clock is ticking.

Nobody quite has the perfect storm devised of how to spend each waking moment, and we all have to do those dreaded things we’d rather not do. But when’s the last time you pulled out the magnifying glass and analyzed what it is (or what it’s not) that’s dragging you down, that excites your personality, that puts you in a state of “flow,” where time passes rapidly without your knowing because you are 100-percent absorbed in what you’re doing that the minutes don’t matter anymore?

Even if you don’t know the solution (or heck, you don’t even know exactly what’s wrong), you should put yourself through the uncomfortable experience of sitting alone with your head in a safe space and unpacking why you feel how you do about what happened today. Then the next day. Or if that’s too much effort, on a weekly basis.

When patterns arise, that’s the easiest way to know for sure without fear of over-analyzing or “just having a bad day” that the problem isn’t your life. It’s not even your circumstances. It’s what you’ve decided to allow happen. And enabled it to continue to happen, either though action or inaction.

Yes, your job was a decision. The people in it were a decision. Letting people treat you this way was a decision. The way you treat yourself is a decision. An unconscious one, perhaps, but all the same, something that could have gone another way. Taken a different turn had you decided it.

Here’s the mind-blower: It still is a decision ( “is” as in present tense verb).

We’re still mulling over what decisions we need to change in our lives, but at least we know the overall direction we want to head. The goals mapped out in front of us. And we know the journey is more important than the destination, which is why we’re on this mission:

To defy what’s expected.
To take each day as it comes and pull one good thing from it.
To see the beauty everywhere, oozing out from places we need further training still to even be aware of.
To be mindful, soak up more of the moment,
and allow ourselves to experience the range of human emotions.
To turn this ship toward a brighter horizon.

Because asking questions without pondering answers is useless. Don’t make reading this post useless.

Your life is a training seminar to becoming the person YOU want to be. It’s a raging battle YOU have to show up for.

Visualize the life you want to lead. See every nook and cranny of it. Then start taking steps that inch you closer to that vision every day.