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Celebrating What is Possible
Life sometimes hand us opportunities for jealousy, self criticism and despair.
Today on my run I ran across a friend I haven't touched base with in a while.
A fellow divorced dad
But clearly no longer single, holding hands with a new girlfriend
Thought about feeling jealous. Thought about wondering:
- why not me?
- why haven't I moved on?But I chose… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Daniel Polehn (@dpolehn)
1:25 AM • Apr 12, 2024
We can take the bate. Wallow in self pity. Come up with all kinds of excuses for why someone has what we don’t have. And maybe that’s OK, for a season. But that’s also how you end wasting your whole summer watching Twin Peaks in the basement.
It’s no way to live.
In the tweet above, by all my possible estimations, what I had just seen should have been impossible. Yet there it was. My friend, who’s even more introverted than me, has somehow managed to enter into a mutual affectionate relationship with another human being.
But that doesn’t mean that the world is inherently unfair. It doesn’t mean that the world is out to get me, by rubbing my face in what I used to have but don’t. It just means that my vision for what is possible in life is too small
I hope this guy has found a good thing. He certainly looked happy. It’s time to be happy with him and to celebrate the possibilities life has to offer all of us.
It’s not a zero sum game.
It’s an infinite game.
When we accept ourselves as we are, even the parts we consider imperfect or incomplete, we make ourselves more able to celebrate the good that’s all around us.
In that celebrating it opens us up to our own possibilities. We still have life paths to walk down, different forks in the road to choose. Not all possible outcomes are closed off to us. Even as we accept the imperfect and incomplete, we recognize our own ability to change them. But to change course requires action.
Acceptance and action work together to form a life that is both content and meaningful.