416. The Only One You Have

You just want to be free. Free to create the life you want for yourself. Free to build the world you want to have with others. Free to have new experiences that go beyond what you’ve already done. But you’re here, trapped in an intermediate form of life somewhere between bare survival and achieving your dreams.

Sometimes success feels so close, as though you could actually step into it. But then one thing or another drags you back into a struggle that you thought you were finished with. There’s always more struggle. Even when you believe you have things under control, there is somehow still more.

You’ve given up on the idea of overcoming struggle. You understand that you have to make life work within it. You and struggle working together, rather than trying to bludgeon each other to death. But even with this advancement in your approach, you’re only able to make limited progress towards a better life. You have so many pressing obligations and you easily fall into a pattern of trying to satisfy them, one after another after another.

The challenge is to thrive while still meeting your responsibilities. To press forward in new ways while also accepting the old. To find freedom within the life you’ve already built for yourself. This isn’t something you can work on part time. You have to be fully immersed in it always or there will be no progress.

It’s the possibility of progress that you can’t escape. You want to move towards the better life you keep imagining. For you know with every ounce of your being that there is more to life than this, that your current position is only one step along the way. And not just for yourself, but for humanity as a whole, too.

But you also know not to let your ideas get too lofty. After all, the challenge can’t be met with ideas or theories. It’s met by transforming actual life, which means the life you’re living right now, the only one you’ll ever have. This is the only chance you’ve got to make things better, not just for yourself but for everyone. So you keep pushing forward. Even the smallest movement towards freedom would still be an incredible achievement.