Is the best yet to come? That depends on your outlook.
Many people, particularly those who are older, believe that once a certain point is reached, they’ve experienced the best of what life has to offer. There is this prevailing myth that youth is where the best times of your life lie, and once a certain expiration date is reached, “the best time of your life” is over and there’s nothing left but to accept the status quo as it is, and live every day as if it’s the same as the day that came before.
It’s this idea that has caused many people to take a position of passive hopelessness. They assume that there’s nothing grand to live for, and there will be nothing better.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ve been on both sides of this idea. There was a time that I adopted this myth. I went through a lot of my 20s, feeling a sense of despair by believing that I “wasted my life”. While I ended up “making up for that”, I never let myself off of the hook of that myth. I still believed in this fallacy that the “best years of my life” were wasted.
A life well lived is taken day by day.
I came out the other side of it, but until I got to the root of why I believed in this myth, there was no realistic way I could see the lie that I bought for what it was.
The fact of the matter is that every day has the potential to be a day that’s lived very well. We just have to know the proper way to approach our lives so we can live up to our potential well into our 40s, 50s, and beyond.
It may feel like every day is the same. You get up, go to work, go home, eat dinner, veg out and watch Netflix, and maybe go out on the weekend. Pretty comfortable living, but after months of this with no changes, you’ll crave something more.
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It all begins in the mind. That determines the type of life that you live.
The first step to breaking out of this kind of funk is to search for a greater purpose. What are some dreams that you had in your youth that were never realized? Do you believe that you can still achieve them at this later stage in your life? If not, why not?
The first step in dispelling this myth is to understand that life doesn’t have an expiration date. If you’re living, you can find the fortitude to reach for the stars, no matter what stage of life that you’re in.
Identify what is holding you back. Not your age, or your daily routine, but the real, deep reasons why you feel that you can’t go for your dreams. You have reasons, but you need to dig down to determine what beliefs or ideas are holding you back from breaking out of the daily funk.
You can create an inspiring, exciting life. But it first starts in the mind. Once you determine what is mentally blocking you from achieve what you want, deep down, you can take steps to go for it.
One last point – always accomplish what you can, within reason. Don’t quit your job or upend your family life just to pursue your dreams. Your ambitions don’t even need to be goals per se, they can just be exciting hobbies that you’ve lost interest in. Something that added spark to your life before, and that can do so again.
Bottom line – don’t ever believe that the best is over just because of some arbitrary factor such as age. There’s always time to cultivate a passionate life for yourself.
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