Apparently not. Apparently, some people deal with every situation as it comes. They don’t spend any time pre-emptively worrying about things before they happen or imagining all the possible scenarios that could unfold.

Instead, these particular people go about their daily life and once they encounter a challenge, they deal with it in the moment. They just handle the situation and then move on. I can’t even imagine how calm and pleasant it must feel to have a mind like that.

Right now, we are in the middle of a crossroads, yet again. We are expats living in a country far away from any family and raising our young daughter on our own.

We’re debating whether to move closer to my husband’s family or closer to mine. We’re trying to figure out what jobs we could get and how much they could pay and if we need to go back to school. We want to do what’s best for our daughter, but also for us. We want to stick to our values, but we know we can’t have it all. We’re aware we need to compromise and sacrifice something.

My old self is rearing to plan, prepare, and organize my potential new life. It’s constantly on over-drive waiting to pounce and dive down a rabbit hole of overthinking. It hates living in uncertainty. But with this many potential scenarios, my head will explode if I sit down and think about every single one of them. Not to mention the life I will miss out on now by thinking about the life that awaits me.

Right now, it’s summer in Australia. The days are long and warm and humid, just the way I like it. As much as I feel like I need to spend every single waking moment planning and worrying, I also want to enjoy my life now.

Relentless Optimism
How a Commitment to Positive Thinking
Changes Everything

By Darren Donnelly

But that wasn’t it at all. My comparison actually had nothing to do with what had happened (or NOT happened) in my life so far. It had everything to do with how I was feeling about my life at the time.

When I was unhappy with my job or my living situation or my social life, my first instinct was to look around and assume the reason for my unhappiness was because I lacked something that other people had.

But now I know better.

At this point in my life, I still haven’t hit a lot of the life milestones for a happy existence, according to societal norms (marriage, kids, house with a big backyard, luxurious vacations, etc.), but I no longer worry about being behind. That’s because I genuinely like the life I’ve built for myself because it aligns with what I most care about.

The reason I was unhappy before wasn’t because I was “behind” … it was because I didn’t know how to measure my life according to the things that actually matter to me.