Making conscious choices in every moment

What if things could be much easier than we make them, if we just train ourselves to approach life differently? What if we just need to get out of one big pattern, instead of having to fix every little single detail of our lives individually?

I’ve for a long time known that our lives to a large degree operate on autopilot. We live the same or similar scenarios from day to day. And if we don’t take a step back and decide to do something differently, we also respond to them out of habit. Our habits shape our lives. Are we satisfied with our lives? If not, we need to change our habits. But what if we don’t have to look at every habit individually? What if there is one habit that we can train ourselves into, that will automatically change all of our other habits?

I’m talking about the habit of making conscious choices. As with any habit, this habit needs training. When we train ourselves to do something, we repeat it over and over again till we don’t have to think about it anymore. Till we do it out of habit. 

What I’ve come to realize, is that when I make a choice that is not in line with how I want to live my life and who I want to be, it’s often not because of weakness or lack of character. It can be that too. Some desires and cravings are simply too hard for me to resist where I am at the present moment. But more often than not, I’m just not really aware of what I am doing. I’m not aware that I’m making a choice. Instead I just allow life to happen. 

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that I have lots of work to do. But let’s also say that I need to cook. I feel a strong resistance to doing the cooking, because I’m also a little tired. And I don’t want to pay for a healthy, readymade meal, because if I want a healthy one, it’s more expensive. So, what ends up happening, is that I have the idea that I have to do both, but I end up wasting tons of time and energy because of the resistance that I feel. In the end I pay might miss doing work that would bring in 50 dollars, because I don’t want to pay ten dollars for a readymade meal. Money that I also could use to make healthier choices in the future.

The point is that I believe that there is another perspective here. I can just decide to be as conscious about the choices that I make every moment. Because every moment is a new moment. Life consists of literally and infinite amount of moments, where I have the possibility of making a conscious choice, or just act out of habit. So maybe instead of expending tons of energy on resisting strong desires and cravings, unless, of course, I have a desire for something that would have serious negative consequences for me and others, I can just relax a bit, make the conscious choice of indulging now and then? Maybe I just need to do these things consciously, with intention? Train myself to do everything this way, so that I can choose something differently when I don’t feel these strong urges. I have a strong feeling that many things will fall away on their own if I do this consistently. There will obviously be some difficulty to adjust to this in the beginning, but this difficulty will rather have to do with that my life is adjusted to the old way of doing things.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash