Return to Reality

Go back to your home town. Witness the budding lifelong love, weddings, growing families, changing communities, career changes, college stories, parking stress, and enthusiasm draining traffic. This is real life. Come back to the river and experience ephemeral love, dynamic water levels, 16 hours of sun, shuttles, swims, and poison ivy. This is real life. Dive into it.

These worlds are disparate. Separated by decisions, separated by geography, separated by economies and sociology. Everyone has chasms in their life, divisions that may be real, or may not be: Work or vacation, family or friends, challenge or relaxation, mountains or ocean. It is the way we integrate and balance these competing interests that defines who we are. We discover this balance in our life, mostly through trial and error, fumbling to understand and respect ourselves. Sometimes it feels like we are dictating who we are, but ultimately you have to trust your heart to determine what is important in your life, and allow yourself to discover it.

Will you move to Guatemala, extricating yourself from family and friends to live a life of change? Will you be achieving your goals by doing this? Will you hear the crash of waves as you sleep or see the fall of snow as you wake in the morning?

What we do know is that you can only determine 10% of someones happiness based on their environment. That means that 90% of our happiness and satisfaction is dependent upon our perception of our environment. So pay attention, give thanks for the events of your day, for the choices you have made to empower your own life and happiness. Exercise. And randomly perform acts of kindness. These are all activites that have shown to put people in a state of positivity, which lends itself to perceiving your environment with gratitude rather than pessimism. And if these activities don't help, perhaps it is time to listen to yourself and shift one of the many balancing acts we perform. Or perhaps it is time to sit around the fire and relax with some friends.