The Pain You Choose

The Pain You Choose

I often talk here about picking one’s battles, and determining when and how one should argue, engage in conflict or put oneself at risk. This is much the same but, perhaps, in a mire passive fashion.

I have a friend that is very dear to me and they routinely burry themselves in material which is mentally exhausting if not harmful to them. If you have been on the internet long you have heard people say to “get off Twitter”, “drop Youtube”, or “Don’t go on Reddit.” Or anecdotes about people cutting out “the news” and what a wonderful change it has made in their lives and it got me to thinking about today’s subject.

What is “the pain we choose”. A great deal of our own well being is in the decisions we make. It is easy to recognize this when we talk about the drugs we take, the food we consume, or the exercises we perform. Less obvious when we think about the positions we take, information we consume, or the control we fail to exercise.

This is not advocacy to burry one’s head in the sand. Nor us it an argument that “all your problems are because of how you view the world.”

It is recognition that we have a substantial impact on our own well being and thus a substantial responsibility to ourselves to take care of it.

In this world of F.O.M.O(Fear Of Missing Out) and activism it is easy to feel that we must be engaged at every moment of every day or we are failing ourselves or worse failing those who need us. However no one who deserves you wants you to suffer on their behalf, and that should include you.

Consider then, are you poisoning yourself? Are you spending too long filling you mind with fear and your soul with anxiety. Are you casting about wildly looking for a fight or heaping stones on your back because you feel immoral if you do not?

The world deserves you at your best, you deserve you at your best and sometimes that means a little preventative maintenance.

Be careful of the pain you choose. Balance out that which leaves you incensed with that which leaves you joyful, and sometimes just take a step away to let yourself just be. You will thank you for it.

Thank you my dear readers and God bless;

~S. Wallace