Live Willingly

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” Isaiah 6

I woke up yesterday to write in my journal (the second thing I do in the morning after drinking a big glass of water) and wrote these two things on a page, a 100 times, just like when you were grounded in high school. I felt the necessity to memorize them:

  • Willingly forward
  • Choose me

I just realized the original quote from the bible says “send me”, instead of “choose me”, either way works. I first saw this quote in the movie Fury. The scene does make you shed a tear. It perfectly depicts Winston Churchill’s quote, when going through hell, keep going.

Send me.

Each and every one of us can live life in two ways, willingly or unwillingly.

But the fact of the matter is that you are already here, you were already born into this world, and, like it or not, you have to get up each and every day to live your life.

The good thing here, and profoundly important as well, is that you are free to choose how are you going to do it.

Being a guide in the Mexican mountains is tough as hell.

Sometimes I find myself in the tent, at 11:30 PM at the night, knowing that I need to get ready to push for the summit in half an hour, without having slept one bit the entire night. My head begins to play tricks on me, making me wonder what the hell am I doing there, and questioning my whole existence. Cortisol levels spiking because of the lack os sleep.

The antidote? Live willingly. Don’t try to run away by bitching constantly in your head about the situation. As David Goggins says: Embrace the suck.

Almost everyone lives in a continuous avoidance of life. It’s nice to say yes to life when it is rosy and nice, but we have to say yes to each and every moment.

Life will give you many tasks that you will not particularly like, but that regardless need to be done in order for you to advance into the better things that you’d rather be doing.

No one starts up being a millionaire, you have to work your ass off to get there. You will have to do a lot of things that you’d rather just skip, sometimes flipping burgers. But eventually, if you say yes to what you know needs to be done enough times, you’ll get there, maybe.

The funny thing is that you think that the price of getting the nice stuff (the end goals) is what will make you happy in the end. You think that the end goal is what you’re looking for, but what you’re really looking for, are the continuous small wins that come each time you choose to say yes to life and live willingly, in the process.

Tons of experiments have been made, and the results are the same, intrinsically motivated people are more successful than extrinsically motivated people. People working solely for money never do as well as people working for the joy of being the best, and becoming better every day at what they do.

Becoming better at what you do is infinitely more rewarding than the money you get. We are, of course, led to believe the other way.

Man, it’s hard to open Medium and read anything.

People are complaining all the time about everything. Don’t get me wrong, I know there is plenty to complain about, plenty. But we’re here, and we need to do the best we can with what we’ve got. This is why it is so important to live willingly.

If you live willingly, you’ll cultivate a mindset of solutions, in comparison to living in avoidance, which will cultivate a mindset of helplessness and inaction. Don’t fall for that trap.

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”
― Jordan B. Peterson

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