When we are trying to bring some kind of order to our lives, we use all sorts of buzz words. We will sometimes say, “I am finding myself.” Other times we will be admonished to “clean up our act” or to “get our act together.” Armed with these wonderfully vague goals, we set out to accomplish them. It should be no surprise if sometimes we aren’t entirely successful.
Part of the problem is that we are not exactly sure what it means to find ourselves or to get our act together. To find ourselves, what exactly are looking to find? To get our act together, do we have any plan in mind or do we know enough about ourselves to even begin to accomplish the task at hand? And even if we do, do we have a full understanding of what want our life to look like, when we have actually gotten our act together? Starting out, we are not really sure what we are trying to do, so it is going to be very difficult for us to achieve success.
We are starting out with the answers to our problems when we are not entirely sure what the questions are that we should be asking ourselves.
First we need to ask ourselves, “What are the problems?” We should start out by getting a clear understanding of what problems we are facing and of what our current situation is. We must have a baseline to work from as we try to sort things out now. This step is going to take some time, because very seldom are the issues we face in life simple ones.
Then we need to ask the next question. “What are the things about my life that are not working?” It could be that we are very disorganized. We might be terrible at managing our time or money. We may have the problem that we lack self-discipline or self-esteem. The source of our problems may also be found in our relationships with other people. We may need to evaluate our priorities and make some changes in what we hold to be important. We possibly need to determine if we are paying a huge price for the things that we want for ourselves. Where indeed is our life just very messy and dysfunctional?
So far, all that we will have done is to do some deep soul-searching and figure out where we are in our lives. We are gathering the facts we will need to find a solution to our problems and wrest back control of our lives from the chaos and mess in which we now live. You must remember that this takes time. It probably took us a long to get to our present situation and it is going to take some time just to get all the facts we are going to need on the table. However if we will take the time necessary to do this, we will have a useful starting point from which we can begin to rebuild our lives into something that enables us to feel happier, more fulfilled and more productive
Confronting who we are and the mess we have made for ourselves may prove to be somewhat painful to do. But abject honest is what is demanded of us if we want to truly change the way things are for us. If we choose to remain in denial about the realities of our lives, we can’t move forward or grow as person. So it would seem we really don’t have much of a choice in this matter.
For now, the bottom line is that if we are thinking about improving the quality of our lives and fixing what is not working for us, we must first get a clear sense of where we are now in our lives and what parts of our lives are not working the way we want them to. The subject of what we would do from this point on is a discussion unto itself and I will leave that matter for another day.
