Choose Your Pain

You can only choose your pain, you can't avoid it

Pain is an inevitable part of being human.

You can try to run away from it, you can hope and pray that you don’t feel it, and you can even try to ignore it.

But you can’t avoid it.

The only real choice you have is which type of pain you want to feel.

On the one hand you have the agony of spending the rest of your life wondering what might have been. On the other you have you voluntarily accept the burden of self-doubt, hard work, and fear of failure.

‘None of the above’ isn’t an option. You have to pick one.

Option numero uno leads to a life of regret. Studies show that old people on their deathbeds regret errors of omission more than errors of commission. Meaning they regret not going for it (whatever “it” is varies depending on who you’re talking to) when they had the chance.

If you choose this route - and most do - you’ll always think ‘damn, I could have been somebody’. You’ll be filled with anger and self-loathing any time you see someone younger than you who has already accomplished more than you.

You’ll end up as a depressed, miserable old man.

One day you’ll be laying on your bed in the hospice, staring into the abyss of death, with the full awareness that everything you were worried about means nothing in the grand scheme of things. You’ll look back over your life and it will be obvious that your existence was nothing more than a temporarily blip with eternal darkness on both ends of it, and you’ll realize that you should have taken things a little bit less seriously, should have viewed life as more of a fun little game rather than as a serious struggle, and that you should have swung for the fences at least once because in the end you’re dead anyway, and now that you’re on your deathbed you’d give anything to turn back the clock but you can’t so now the only thing you can do is die with your regrets.

OR

You could choose option #2, the only real option if you have even the tiniest shred of ambition within you.

Since nothing matters in the grand scheme of things you might as well just decide to go for whatever it is you want to go for.

If you fail and feel embarrassed?

So what. The brain that’s feeling those emotions is going to be rotting underground in a matter of decades.

Everyone you know is talking shit and telling you to be realistic? Who cares, both them and you will be dead in the same multi-decade timeframe.

Once you realize that nothing matters, you become free to attempt anything.

You start thinking: “What can I accomplish before the clock runs out?”

Whether you’ll actually be able to make it happen or not is up to you and Lady Luck (she always gets to throw her two cents in).

What can I say? It might not work out.

But one thing is certain: At least you won’t die with any regrets.