2️⃣130: You Can Do Anything ☃️

Having the freedom to choose is scary.

What if we pick the wrong thing?

What if we pick the right thing, but it’s harder than we thought it would be?

What if we’re struggling to do something new, or change something, and we don’t want to struggle any longer?

What if we’re not even aware we have the choice to do something different because the thought has never crossed our mind?

I like to imagine my mind as an infinite series of rooms with two doors—one you come in through and one you exit through. There are an infinite number of rooms that represent an infinite number of possibilities. Possibilities of all the different things you could choose to do. All the different paths your life could take.

As we move through our lives, as time passes, as we age, as we experience different things—we move through these rooms. Sometimes we’re moving through a single room at a time. Sometimes we’re in many rooms all at the same time.

You could step through a door that leads you to a new career opportunity, or you could step through a door where you quit a job. Depending on what room you step in to, the door for you to exit through is always different (even though it doesn’t look different).

There are doors available to us for every single decision we make, and every door leads to a new room based on that decision. You can move forward, to the side, backwards, even up and down—like that elevator from the end of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971).

Each room represents the sum of the choices we’ve made that brought us there. The choices we make when we step through doors can be huge, life-changing decisions, or they could be small, regular, mundane decisions.

For example—

At night, after I’ve showered but before I’m getting in to bed to go to sleep, I like to wear socks. I wear socks because I don’t want to walk barefoot and pick up everything on the ground with my feet right before getting into my clean bed. So I put on a fresh pair of socks for about 30 minutes, maybe less, maybe more. Once I get into bed, my socks make my feet too warm and uncomfortable, so I take them off. Sometimes, they keep my feet just warm enough that I wear them all night.

Sometimes I wear tall socks, sometimes I wear short socks.

The other day, I was going to put on socks after showering, and I noticed all the short socks were in the laundry.

It’s not cold enough to wear long socks, what am I going to do?

I sat there for a few moments wondering how I could address this issue. I put on my long socks, but immediately felt uncomfortable. This is not what I want at this moment. These socks are already making me feel too warm. But all the short socks are in the hamper, damn. Guess I’m fucked, and I just need to suck it up and wear these long socks until I’m ready to go to sleep, or go barefoot.

But I don’t want to do that.

I continued to sit. Trying to figure out what I could do.

Then, all of a sudden, it came to me. An idea. A way I could fix this.

I pulled my tall socks down and bunched them up over my ankle.

Boom💥

I was still wearing socks, tall socks, but they weren’t making me warm and uncomfortable. It had never occurred to me—I could just bunch up my long socks. It’s not that I had thought about it and decided I didn’t want to do it, the thought had literally never crossed my mind.

When I made the decision to bunch up my socks, it felt like I was giving my brain, and my life, new possibilities.

In my mind—I was in a room. A room I had been in for a very long time, and I looked at a door that had always been there. I had not been aware there was a door there. There could’ve even been a time when I looked in that direction and there was no door to be seen. But the door was always there.

What was holding me back from going through the door?

I couldn’t tell you.

But, eventually, I noticed the door existed, and I made the choice to walk through it. On the other side of that door was a room exactly like every room before.

The only difference was that in this room I had new possibilities. I now knew that I could bunch up my long socks and wear them before going to bed, even if it was not usually the time of the year when I enjoyed wearing the long socks.

When I had this realization—my mind was blown 🤯

There was another room here? Another door for me to walk through? How many more doors like this exist? How many rooms like this exist? Are they infinite? Can I actually do whatever I want? Is it just on me to choose? Is it on me to conjure up the possibility that things could be different? That I could (scared shitless as I type this out) change something that I have always done in my life and do something entirely different?

Can anyone do this? Is this part of the human experience? Are the possibilities really endless as long as we decide that there are endless possibilities that are all attainable if we walk through enough doors into enough new rooms?

This is getting me excited.

Maybe I’ll change up a few more things. Maybe I can drink more water and less juice and soda. Maybe there are carbonated water alternatives available with no sugar but still enough flavor to still be enjoyable with food. Maybe I’ll switch to flavored sparkling water during lunch and dinner to cut out all that sugar. Maybe I can just wake up exactly when my alarm rings and not snooze it three times. Maybe I don’t have to scroll through social media before I even have breakfast.

Maybe I don’t have to scroll through social media at all 😦

Maybe I can learn not to get riled up when someone says something I strongly disagree with and all I want to do is tell them why they’re wrong. Maybe I can just relax and realize there’s no magical phrase I’m going to say that will change the way they look at the world, and there are better ways for me to spend my time and energy to have a positive impact.

Maybe I can move back in with my parents.

Maybe I can choose to send an email every Tuesday because I decided that was a good day to send it and convince everyone it’s a great idea and start a really cool brand by writing random ideas and sharing them through my emails and coming up with funny memes that relate to the emails and also to real life and make some cool t-shirts that I hand out to friends and people who always read the email—and maybe after a couple of hundred emails I start to become semi-influential in niche online and irl circles because people enjoy what I’m writing and after another couple hundred emails that influence slowly grows past those spaces and is discovered by more people, and eventually, it becomes part of a generation’s zeitgeist.

Who knows? Anything can happen.

I just have to decide.