Life Is A Series Of Trade-Offs And Choices
…since we cannot have it all. It's all about balancing things.
We all make choices that sometimes go counter to who we are. But, in the long run, these difficult decisions are more often than not the better ones. At a certain point in my life, I had to make a choice.
Priorities, as many would put it. It came with age, as well as an increasing number of responsibilities as time and experience increased. It’s funny, but in many ways very right when people say, the more you earn, the more we spend, lockstep of sorts. The way responsibilities work is the same.
I believe that life has three parts: work, family, and goodies. You will already know what work and family are, but the goodies are fun things like travel, parties, fancy dinners, and the rest. The kind of stuff that looks good on Instagram and that you can brag about to friends.
It’s lovely if we could have it all, but we can’t. You can party it up and hang onto a relationship, but your work will suffer. I can be the star at work and be the toast of the party, but the family will suffer. I can travel a lot, but then work and family will suffer. I tried a few combinations myself, and they always ended up the same way. I even tried to cram it all together, but I ended up a burned-out mess. That was my ego being my worst enemy.
I chose to be responsible for my work and my family. That doesn’t mean I don’t take the occasional “me” time. But my focus has been on work and family for a long time. The memory of the warm sun from the long weekend on a beach won’t last nearly as long as the hugs I get from my little niece, who wakes me up in the morning when she is around. In the end, there’s no one I’d want to meet at a party who I’d like to spend more time with than my mother.
“Life is about tradeoffs. It’s about choices because we can’t have it all. That’s the harsh reality of it.”
We are saying “No” to things that don’t add value to our lives. It’s not in any way a negative, but a positive, teaching us the value of what we have.
When we know what to say no to and why we have to, we can say yes to the things that matter, with comfort and confidence, to the things that last.
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