THE LIFE CHOICES THAT MAKE YOU HAPPY

I am convinced that it is the life choices you make that are not about status and gadgets are the ones that make us happiest. Our entire existence, according to glossy magazines, consists of showing off our superficial happiness, our financial status. We are really, really successful if we have a big house and a big shiny car outside. Our children must be well educated and our clothes must be quietly luxurious. Beneath the surface we struggle. Our marriages are often over a long time ago. No one dares to take the plunge. Maybe because the economy is the only thing that keeps two souls together who have stopped hugging each other and where time is the dustiest thing we own. The children react in adulthood to the lack of time you did not have for them when they were small. “Huh, why are you making a fuss about it now? It was so long ago.”

Research shows that the happiest people have made their life choices with their heart instead of their brain. And it is the women who take the step outside the comfort zone. To be free, to try new things, to travel to the place you dreamed of. To let the thoughts fly, to get uncomfortable and make life choices that are exactly the opposite of what the norm in the nice neighborhood requires. Your life choices affect many more than yourself. Don't make a mess of it for your friends or neighbors. What if everyone made such crazy decisions as quitting their safe job and moving to a village far out in the country? Or woe and horror abroad without a real job? Or meeting a younger man and just wallowing in love and kisses and rose petals and loving every second of empathetic encouragement from someone whose brain is sorted and whose senses are in the right place in the system? Your life choices can be devastating to someone close to you who absolutely does not want their house of cards ruined. For the hell of it, let everything be as usual. You are surprised, stunned that you are losing a close friend. But you have messed up her or his existence by making life choices that she or he wished they dared.

It also turns out through research that the day we lie there at the end, we are after all quite satisfied with our life choices. In most cases, we have reconciled with old wrongs and above all with ourselves. Our steps on the piano blur and maybe even reconciliation fades from memory. While the glorious moments, the forbidden meetings, the genuine laughter, the mischief, the bravest movements - we remember them and they are the ones we enjoy when we soon have to say goodbye.

We don't know how much time we have left, luckily. But I feel strongly that the time is NOW to make a change. Take your pulse. What patterns can you break to get closer to yourself, your dreams? Are you running away from yourself? Do you have a thousand irons in the fire to avoid getting close to what you really have to grab to get peace? It's an awful lot of hard work to break patterns. It sucks. It brings up worries and questions you never got answers to, maybe even never dared to ask. A quiet acceptance that caused your body to react with pain, anxiety, flight behavior for many, many years. You may question and curse yourself for accepting other people's behavior towards you for so many years. At the beginning of the process, there are guaranteed to be three steps forward and four steps back. But then, when the steps forward become more than the steps back, then you begin to approach the core, your sun, your moon, your purest self. And then, then the neglected dreams knock on your now open door and ask "can we come in?"

With love. m.