cft

How To Move Forward With Your Life During This Pandemic Even When You Don’t Know What to Do.

The only way forward is inward.


user

Abayomi omoogun

a year ago | 6 min read

Dissatisfaction is a great starting point, for it is right there that we have the most power, strength, and energy to push change through. David DeNotaris.

I’m tired of everything.

I hear this from close ones virtually every day.

What can I do? How can I be of help? I often ask

If there’s anything this pandemic has shown, its that it showed us how we love what we hate. Seems paradoxical but true.

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

We hate struggling to get something. But when that same struggle is removed from our lives, we become miserable.

Most people who are miserable with their life isn’t that they don’t know what to do. Its that they have gotten used to not struggling to get what they want out of life.

People who are obese know they need to exercise. But because they are fine without struggling, they remain obese.
People who are in a toxic relationship know they need to quit their relationship. But because they have found a way of handling their partner toxicity, they remain in that relationship for as long as they can bear.
People who are unsuccessful knows they need to try different thing before they can have a get-go at life. But because they have resorted to being mediocre or not experimenting with their lives, they rather remain where they are.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche

Understand that the more you adapt your body to a changing environment whether it suits you or not, the more you get comfortable with it over time-its just human nature. And growth above all depends on how adaptable you are.

“If we fail to adapt, we fail to move forward.” John Wooden

I get it, most people are tired of this pandemic and can’t wait for it to be over. Damn, I myself can’t wait for it to be over. But what can we do till it's over? we have to keep trying things by experimenting from wherever we are.

You can use this period to try something you’ve always wanted to do. Learn a new skill or language, learn design or coding in as much as it’s something that interests you.

You need to know that the attitude you develop during this period can either break you or make you.

Attitude, you see is a very good thing if you find a way to make it work for you. Your mental attitude, physical attitude, and emotional attitude, all play a role in your life whether you like it or not. And the sooner you start to develop the right attitude towards life, the better you become in moving past difficult situations.

If you use this period as a period for learning and developing good mental models towards life, you will get by a lot. At the same time, if you use this period to self-sabotage your life by not doing anything meaningful with it, you only cause more havoc to yourself.

Speaking of self-sabotage, we sabotage ourselves in many ways we don’t even know we do. And oftentimes, our self-sabotage boils down to our attitude.

The law of self-sabotage

Each of us has a particular way of looking at the world, of interpreting events and the actions of people around us. This is our attitude, and it determines much of what happens to us in life.
If our attitude is essentially fearful, we see the negative in every circumstance. We stop ourselves from taking chances. We blame others for mistakes and fail to learn from them. If we feel hostile or suspicious, we make others feel such emotions in our presence. We sabotage our career and relationships by unconsciously creating the circumstances we fear the most.
The human attitude, however, is malleable. By making our attitude more positive, open, and tolerant of other people, we can spark a different dynamic. We can learn from adversity, create opportunities out of nothing, and draw people to us. We must explore the limits of our willpower and how far it can take us. Robert Greene.

Learning to change your attitude towards life is crucial at this point in time. It’s funny when people think things will still go back to the way they once were. Things are not changing anytime soon which is why you need to look at the world from another lens through your attitude by not sabotaging yourself any further.

“The truth is unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.” Steve Maraboli.

You are not tired, you are just bored

Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash
Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash
If you’re feeling directionless, bored, apathetic, depressed, indifferent, stuck, whatever. Get a hobby and watch your life change. Ayodeji Awosika

When I ask people how their day was, I get almost the same answer “Kinda boring.”

So what did you do today? Nothing really watched Netflix, scroll through my social media, sleep, eat and chat with my friends.

Really? you expect to do this all day and still be happy with yourself without getting bored.

You cant go about life-consuming things all day and not get tired of life. And that’s the funny thing, the modern economy as we know it is built on human consumption to little creation.

The economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. Raoul Vaneigen.

See you can come at me all you want but the truth is if you don’t find something challenging or something to struggle for you’re bound to be miserable.

In the wise words of Dale Carnegie:

“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart. Live for it, die for it, and you will find the happiness you had thought could never be yours.”

If you hate being bored, its because you haven’t been doing something well with your time.

Without work, boredom is bad and something to escape from. With work, boredom signals new challenges for you. It’s important you know the difference.

“I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (…) Boredom opens up space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”? Slavoj Žižek

The thing is we’ve termed the word boredom to be a negative thing and that’s why we try to escape it every now and then. But the truth is if you don’t find time to do what interest you, you will always experience boredom and you will always term it to be a negative thing.

You might be wondering but I don’t know what I love or my passion.

Here it is

Action creates engagement. Engagement creates inspiration, inspiration creates passion, and passion creates meaning.

So if you don’t know your passion, start by taking action to do what interest you. Be it reading, writing, building, or creating as long as it is something that interest you.

The thing with most people is that they don’t like to try something new which is why they remain stuck where they are.

Take for example an artist, chances are that you experience boredom every now and then. Why? Because boredom sometimes comes in the form of resistance to hinder you from your work.

And in the words of Steven Pressfield that says:

Resistance knows how hard the task will be and uses boredom to nudge us away from it while offering us all kinds of easy ways out.

If you aren’t learning anything, don’t expect not to get bored.

If you aren’t struggling to get something, don’t expect not to get bored.

If you aren’t developing a skill, don’t expect not to get bored.

I have never skipped a day reading since 2018, never skipped a day writing since 2019. In fact, I’ve made reading and writing a habit that I practically can't do without them for a day.

The time you spend binge-watching Netflix, use it for practice.
The time you spend scrolling through endless feeds on social media, use it to develop a skill.
The time you spend on trying to self sabotage yourself, use it to do the real work in your life.

Devotion to the right things is the difference between those who are living a complete, meaningful life and those who are just reacting to what others require of them, writes Thomas Oppong.

The pandemic has changed a lot of things from what normal looks like. It is up to you to harness it to your own advantage.

I really don’t know what the future holds for me or anyone. But what I can tell you is this — rather than predicting your future, invent it instead and be the captain of your own ship.

I’m tired too as well but I have a job and duty to do. And it’s to keep me with the right attitude towards the ever-changing life of ours. Because the only way forward is inward. And that starts by developing the right attitude towards life and inventing the future you want for yourself.

Its time to move forward. Why not let’s move together.

Upvote


user
Created by

Abayomi omoogun

Just writing.


people
Post

Upvote

Downvote

Comment

Bookmark

Share


Related Articles