Happy Valentines Day! I hope you are well. If you are like most American military couples, at the beginning of a new year, you tend to take a little more of a critical look at your lives and ask yourselves, is this where we thought we would be at this stage of our lives, are we happy with how things are, are there other things we could do to improve our lives and circumstances?
Maybe you want to finally get your finances in order, deepen your spiritual lives, improve your health, pursue a different career, or quite possibly improve your marriage.
If you really want to change your lives it will take more than a simple new year’s resolution. In fact, it will require something far more important, far more powerful. It will require a complete change of how you live. This change is characterized by being deliberate to distinguish between what is vital and what is trivial. This means you are not wasting your life on the non-essentials but rather spending your time and energy focusing on what really matters most.
Your decision to change how you live encompasses three essential elements:
The first is “the relentless pursuit of less but better.” This is coming to a point where you take inventory of your life and consider all the things you thought were important and invested so much of your time and energy into and then ask yourself whether this is still the case? If not, then you need to determine, what do I need to eliminate?
The second element is “living by design, not by fault.” This describes the importance of living your life by your choice, not by someone else’s. Much of the struggle and stress we have in life is trying so hard to keep up with the expectations of everyone else. What is important to remember is, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”
The third element is “making the wisest investment of your time and energy according to what is most important or vital.” Have you ever wondered why so many people in this country respond to the question of how they are doing with “I am so busy?” Is it any surprise then to learn that you live in the country with some of the highest rates of suicide, stress, divorce, homicides and drug use in the entire world?
Making the decision to change your life will require making some tough decisions. It may require ending some friendships, changing jobs, taking an enormous step of faith, transferring to a different unit or eliminating a long history of destructive behavior. For me several years ago, I had to come to the point of deciding that if I was going to save my marriage I had to get serious about determining what was really important to me and then orienting my life accordingly, in my case, my marriage.
I leave you with one last point, the future of your life, your marriage, your family, rests with the decisions you make today. I encourage you to become an expert on being able to determining what is truly vital vs. what is trivial and then organize your life accordingly.