Page of Swords

A young man readies himself with his sword, looking over his shoulder for whatever might come his way

When we are creating the life we want, we are often bringing new energies into our life that weren’t previously there. To experience this new life we need to learn to live in this new way.

However, nothing new comes naturally or easily. It’s much like buying a nice pair of jeans. The jeans look very attractive there on the shelf. We hold them out and hold them against our bodies to see how they might look on us. We try  them on and walk about in them to make sure they are comfortable for us to wear, to make sure they are adequately sized for us, to make sure our movement is not at all restricted in them. Then we buy the jeans and take them home. But we still need to break them in. We still need to wear them until they reshape themselves to feel completely comfortable, to form to our unique physical frame.

In this way we also have to break in a new lifestyle, an new way of living, a new perspective on our own lives and the world in general. Once we bring into our lives that which we desire, we then have to get used to living with it. This is not without its challenges. Just like the new jeans, as nice as we believe we look when we are wearing them, we still tug and pull at them. We still wash them round after round while they are transitioning from the cut of the template to our custom form.

There are times we have to try new things that we’ve never tried before. We have to take new actions to move us toward the life we want. These actions may feel awkward and challenging. We might begin to step into our new role and be surprised that it doesn’t feel as wonderful as we had initially thought it might. That is because we have not learned to incorporate the new way of being into who we are, into how we define ourselves.

It is at this stage that we often will turn around, abandoning this uncomfortable newness to head back to what was more familiar, more comfortable. It may not have been our ideal, but it was known to us. We had already established nice safe routines in how to negotiate that way of living. We may not have liked some aspects of that way of being, but we had tools and coping mechanisms in dealing with those annoyances.

This is when we need to ask ourselves which we would truly prefer when we look at it with open eyes; would we rather be awkward but excited and on our way into our new lifestyle, or would we rather be comfortable, safe, but unpleasant? If we remind ourselves that the learning period is temporary, and as we learn to live in the new way it will become more familiar, more comfortable, but that it takes time. When we welcome the idea that there will be challenges, there will be missteps and stumbles, there will be obstacles on our way to the life we want, we can accept them as part of the package of positive change, knowing that we’ve earned that which we want through practice, and through courage to face the challenges we encounter on the way.