5 Simple & Grounding Questions to Ask Yourself When Feeling Lost
‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’
Today, I would like to share 5 simple (but difficult) questions that I ask myself when I am lost. These questions helped me re-gain clarity over my life and where I am heading and gave me a new perspective.
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#1 My Self Searching Journey
The past few years, I have been searching for myself. I am trying to find who I am, what I really want to do with life, what is my life purpose and some other hard questions which I do not have the answers. When one of my close friend’s brother suddenly died out of a car accident, I realized that life is short and at that moment, a lot of the things that I was worrying do not seem to matter as much.
And when I am now looking back with a bit more perspective, I realised that the ‘bad’ experience that I have gone through defined and shaped me into who I am today more than the ‘good’ experience does. It is important to remind myself that the primary cause of happiness is never the situation, but my thoughts about it. Perspective alone can determine how we choose to make sense of the world around us. This is definitely something I truly believe in. We can’t control what life throws at us, but we can control how we react to life’s occurrences. When I close my eyes and turn my attention within instead of outwards, I realized that I have more answers within me.
#2 Where am I?
And taking a step back every once in a while and looking at my lives and my realities from a third-eye bystander perspective is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to recharge my batteries recalibrate and refocus on the road ahead. And whenever I do, the first question I ask myself is “where am I”.
“Where am I” sounds like a silly question but it puts my perspective from wherever it may be back to the present moment. And I become conscious about where am I mentally, physically. Mentally is a little harder because you do have to do some mental gymnastics to figure out where exactly you are and not to be stuck somewhere in the future or somewhere in the past.
Physically it is easier but it grounds myself and brings my conscious self or spirit or soul which may be wondering around back to my mind and really appreciate and grateful that I am safe in this space and I am safe and healthy in my own body. I would make a mental inventory of everything that I possess or it can be making a mental note that I am grateful that I get to see all of these with my eyes, that my body is all working and functioning well, that I am breathing and that everything is working the way it should.
When you’re just not present you cannot focus on the things around at all, so by asking myself “where am I” I bring myself, mentally and physically back to where I am at the present moment at home or abroad or anywhere and I start appreciating. When I start appreciating and being grateful and at present, it calms my mind and this preps me to re-organizing and re-booting myself to be able to find and see my path ahead.
#3 Am I happy with my life now?
This is a little different from am I happy because I am more focusing on am I satisfied with my life am I happy with what I have got now, why or why not and what more do I need in life to make it worth living.
I like to think that everything is a present, is a gift, even when the experience makes me sad I like to think that there is something I need to learn from it and that is the whole purpose of that experience. It is kind of like honoring your life and yes it is pretty painful in the process when I was figuring out the lesson and letting go of the past.
This is when I really go the minimalist way to remove a lot of things in my world and just sort of hiding myself in the cave as much as possible. Instead of thinking about what I can add to my life, I would be thinking about what are the core things that I cannot live without the bare minimum because then I realize I really have a lot, too much actually. We don’t actually need much in our lives, to be happy, to sustain and to live.
#4 Would this matter 50 years later?
I would think like the old man (or woman) and the sea and ask myself “will any of this matter when I am 80 years old when I am sitting on a rocking chair, overlooking the beautiful ocean or looking over the mountain top over the woods?” The answer is probably no if I am being really honest with myself and 99.9 of the things I’m worried about right now and that’s stressing me out probably won’t matter. So, it would not make sense if I sweat about it now if it would not matter 50 years later. And this thought is so liberating and it just lifts the weight from my mind and I feel free to think about solutions and ways of how I can move around that or move beyond that in a graceful manner.
#5 Is this my choice?
When I grew up, I realize that most of my life so far is about fulfilling other people’s expectation of me, including my family, my parents. I am living how I should live according to their wish, their expectation and less about what I want. So now, I have learned that no one would be responsible for your life but yourself. So I am the only person who should take responsibility to make sure that I am living the way I choose. Which means, no I don’t have to be a lawyer. I don’t have to find a job in a law firm. I don’t have to work overnight. I don’t have to follow society ‘norm’. I can be myself. I can live my life the way I want as long as it is good for me and not doing any harm to others. I have the choice to choose the work that I want to do.
So I am grateful that I am so lucky to be able to have choices and loving parents who are understanding and supporting of whatever I choose to do. This is so helpful whenever I am going through rough times or when I am stressing or when I am feeling overwhelmed, to remind myself that this life is my choice. I choose to live this way and I have to take responsibility. And if it really does not work, I still have other choices. No one is ever without choices and there are always more solutions to one problem.
If how I am living is not to my choice, then I will try to change course to the direction of my choosing. And the longer path that I have taken would not be wasted at all — they are natural learning path for me and I would embrace those as part of my life and as something that can help us improve and get better to make me realise my real goal, my real direction, and purpose. We are all responsible for our own lives and we are responsible to choose the life that we want to live instead of blaming it on others when life does not turn out as we expect.
When I came to this realization, it just made me see that my problems really are not that big of problems. If I can minimize my problems and exists in a state of being more present and more grateful about being able to exercise my freedom of choice in my own life instead of being stressed and overwhelmed, then it will be less of a burden and it turns into a positive experience.
Regardless of your religion and spirituality at the end of the day, realizing that if we can take control of our own lives and be less of a burden to society and to those around us to the world, and instead be a more proactive member of society and putting our best foot forward in making it a better place and making our existence of significance of contributing our unique value, giving back as much as we can. That is what I believe the purpose of our existence and my life purpose.
#6 If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?
One of Steve Jobs’s most awakening quote for me is this one: “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Sometimes it takes death to remind us what it means to be alive, but we do not want that to happen at least not soon. So I really take this to heart and ask myself how I would live my life if it is the last day of my life here on earth. A few faces and names would come up in my mind right after I ask this question. And I would make sure that spend time regularly with these people because I know that if today were the last day of my life, this is the way I would like to spend it — with my family, my parents, my grandma, my cousins, uncles aunts, closet friends, etc.
It could be a really ‘normal’ day and I realized that the older I become, and the more mature I become, the ‘normal’ day just spending time with my family and friends become the best time and the happiest time I have in my life. Those success in career or business are great but they do not even come close to these time I spend with people I care and love the most. But usually, in our busy days, these people are the ones that we overlook because we are too busy making a living or working hard in our job or business that we sacrifice our time with them. So this question is sort of like a wake-up call once in a while to remind me to spend time on what really matters.
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