An Active Participant

"I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life." - Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

That's not something we always think about is it? We at most never consider ourselves as active participants in our own lives. Yes we make decisions about things, yes we make choices that define both us and the direction of our lives but we never consider ourselves to be active participants in the definition of those moments. They are merely what the bigger picture calls 'life'.

Half of the time we mere mortals spend our days working for clients, staring out of the train window on the commute home and mindlessly stirring our dinner before shovelling it in our mouths. Granted we have great moments in between, a co-worker that makes you belly laugh, helping an elderly lady onto the platform and accidentally dropping the entire bottle of chilli flakes into your dinner, but are we actually active within those?

There is, as far as science can suggest, no set path. No defining moment exists to suggest that our lives, as soon as we are pushed from the womb, are already predefined and set out. So how can we not be active? If the path is not set, surely we are active beings in defining that path? 

But I think we get lost. Time slips from one day to the next, one weekend to another and before we have even realised it's five years later, you've become a shadow of your former self and it's at that moment, according to Gilbert, that we stop and think wow - I created this. 

We each, whether we have recognised or not, have actively participated in every single second of every moment of our lives conscious or not. We have created an existence of being that, whether or not we are happy about it, we have actively chosen to exist within. 

So I guess the real question is, at what point do we become inactive if the conscious active state is not recognised? Perhaps this can be found at birth and during our toddler years. We at that point have no capabilities to make decisions for ourselves and so decisions are made for us and perhaps the organic route of inactivity can be found here. The moment when before we even understand decision making, we bypass this learning and are given a life that our ancestors, and theirs before them, believe to be best for us.

But then if this decision making process is never fully allowed to flourish in our tiny minds, how can we ever possibly be fully active in our own lives? How can we recognise every moment as a vital tipping point between one path and another, or a million other paths for that fact?

Maybe the real answer is we cant and we don't. Maybe the reason we are so inactive for some many points of our lives is that we are saving ourselves for the big active moments. The decisions we must face to redefine the existence of ourselves - much like the decision for divorce in Gilbert's novel. The kick up the bum if you will. 

When I sat in a cafe in Edinburgh with a job offer for a role far from my home town and in a city I barely knew anything of, I had to make that decision - to be an active participant in the creation of my own life. Had I not, I would have never met my partner, never moved into our little house in a cul de sac and have been writing this post on the sofa we bought together. 

The state of being both active and inactive is a state of total mutual appreciation. We allow ourselves those smaller inactive moments to build ourselves up for the bigger ones that lay down the stones, brick by brick, to a new path and a new kind of existence.