Creating Our Own Reality

It has been said that we create our own reality. The lives we lead, what we have and don’t have, is all based around what we have created for ourselves.

This seems to make a lot of sense, regardless of the situation we find ourselves in, it can all be traced back to what we have created for ourselves.

On the extreme side, our smoking or drinking habit affects us closer towards the end of our life, and by the time it has caused physical problems there is usually very little we can do about it, our diet and habits result in mostly permanent damage that we cannot undo once done, and this is the extreme cases of how our choices create the reality we will live in.

Not so obvious are the everyday situations we create for ourselves as well.

First of all, our brains are very good at telling us that almost everything is not our fault, we are not to blame for the way a situation played out, its not our fault that the economy is bad and in turn we cannot afford anything, how could we have been expected to know that something was going to happen, what could we have done to stop it anyway, its just not our fault.

It is either something that couldn’t have been foreseen and avoided, or it is simply someone else’s fault.

Every once in a while it might be our fault, but in those times “it really could have happened to anyone” right. Therefore we are only as much to blame as the next person would have been anyway.

This is not a bad thing, we don’t want to be so concerned that we will be blamed that we do not do anything, and in some cases this is one of the big reasons we don’t do things, we don’t want the responsibility or blame if it should go wrong or not work out as expected.

So in some cases this ability of our brains to transfer blame or avoid it is good, and in some cases it is not good. Unfortunately, while our brains may be good at helping us avoid blame and shift it on to other people or situations, it is not at all good at discerning in which cases to do this, it is simply a blanket operation. We have to actively choose when to assign blame, something which is uncomfortable to do when we are actually the ones to blame, so we tend to let our brain just choose for itself almost all the time.

The effect of this is that we live in a reality that we do not have much control over, how can we consider ourselves as having control when we cannot control what creates our reality?

When we wake up in the morning, like I did this morning, with no electricity, I can get any, stomp around blaming the inadequacy of the electricity company, let it ruin my day. I can feel I am completely justified in being in a bad mood due to this. Or I can take control of my reality. I can find things that need to be done that do not require electricity, I can get a pen and paper out and write out my next blog, put together the plan for a project I am working on, read some of a book I have been trying to finish, or find anything else that I can do, and not let the electricity outage ruin my day.

When I am short of money, I can blame the economy, blame anyone else, or choose to deal with it. Sit down and do a budget to help better manage my money, find ways to earn a little more, basically take control and manage the situation I find myself in while also working towards ensuring I have chosen to create the reality I will find myself in, in the future.

If I stomp around cursing the electricity company, the economy and the stray cat, ultimately I am doing nothing to change my situation, and therefore will not find myself out of it tomorrow, next week, or next month.

That I think is what the phrase “creating your own reality” means. Looking at your life, your situation, then planning and taking action on steps that will see you having the life you want instead of waking up every day and just taking whatever life hands you.

It of course takes effort to evaluate your life, and more effort to plan, and even more to take action, so most people will rather just transfer the blame and save themselves the trouble of being in charge of their own life and shaping their own destiny. The ones who do do it successfully, often try to share the secret of “creating your own reality” and find that they are considered motivational, or inspirational, but ultimately have little effect on getting people to put in the effort.

So if we want to create our own reality, shape our own destiny, we have to be willing to put in the effort, accept the responsibility and see just how close to our dreams we can get.