Sometimes it’s hard to not let others control your life and you. Sometimes it’s not even possible.
The last week I watched a lot of documentaries about the Queen as I guess a lot of you did. It’s a fascinating story, which I didn’t know. I grew up with the Queen being an old monarch and I never thought much about her until I visited London and my sister moved to England. The Queen and the monarchy is a huge part of their culture and heritage.
I was watching the documentaries and now started to watch The Crown, and couldn’t imagine what the Queen was already going through in her 70 years on the throne. The culture, the life and everything was so different when she became Queen in 1952. It was a hard time after the Second World War, and there were also still so many unspoken rules of society. In the series they showed that the cabinet decided where the Queen and her family will live and what hobby her husband was allowed to have.
I don’t know if those restrictions are still the case (I hope not and I’m not that far in the series yet), but letting someone else decide where you have to live and what hobbies you are allowed to do is a big decision made for her. She couldn’t decide, but she did decide how to react to that and how she still stayed herself. She made a promise to serve the country and she is keeping that since 70 years. Even though it led her to choose the duty over her family and her husband. She accepted the duty and arranged herself into that life.
Even though these days only a few people will have those kind of duties, sometimes there are people, jobs, university, duties that will make decisions for you, but you decided to accept that and arranged yourself with it. You choose yourself and the duties you want to take on in your life. Find your passion or your life goal and do what it takes to live for it. There will always be some external stuff which you allow to control your life, and that is fine. Fighting against it will drain your energy more then arranging yourself with it. Some things you cannot change, accept it.
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
– Carl Jung
Accepting Unchangeable Things
Accepting things you cannot change is the first step into a happy and fulfilling life. Then you can focus on yourself and your goals and passions, and what you can and want to change.
You also need to accept yourself. There is only a limited amount of yourself which you can change. You, me and every human being is changing their whole life. Improve yourself! Without improvement you will be stuck at this position, but time and people pass on.
Accepting the unchangeable things about yourself and then accepting change during your life are the first big steps to a great you and life.
I’m not 100% there yet, because I have a lot of self doubt and most of the time I don’t believe in my own skills, and I’m working on it. I already achieved a lot in my young life and looking back and realizing that helps me to let go of those self doubts. I’m still learning and trying.
But our whole life is work in progress, thank God. Because without it life would get boring soon. You’ve already achieved a lot and in a few years you achieved more than you can think about now. And that’s the fascination of life. You cannot possibly know what’s happening in the future, because we will always just have this present.
What we can do is accept the present and work on us and in the present to make our future better.
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
– Mother Teresa
Let us live in the moment and accept the things in the past and the things we cannot change in the present.
The future depends on what you do today.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Books, I’m reading for self improvement and helping me with my self doubt:
- Thrive by Arianna Huffington: interesting stories from Arianna herself and how to thrive in this busy world
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson: sometimes what keeps us from being ourselves is thinking about what other people think
- Das Kind in dir muss Heimat finden von Stefanie Stahl: kehre zu deinem inneren Kind zurück
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