There’s a difference between designing your life and letting it run its course. I think I keep coming back to this topic because I’m still (if you can ever really be done with it) trying to figure out the course I want my life to take. But it feels like an incredible time to do that, with more and more people actually jumping off autopilot mode.
Autopilot can look incredibly well organised and productive from the outside, but running life on default settings often just means you’re letting the outside world decide and dictate how you go through it. What separates that from living fully and on your own terms is “choice”, especially the choice of how you see life when things aren’t going to plan.
For me, that’s been a real challenge, because my life is THE definition of non-linear. And while there’s a lot of friction and challenges, I consider myself lucky, but not because things work out in my favour (though they often do) - because of how I’ve learned to see things when they don’t.
And then something unexpected happens
My favourite example of this is the time a lovely dog I was looking after for a friend ate my passport. It chewed it up like something out of a very bad joke and completely screwed up my travel plans. I often think of that moment as the one when I decided to change my outlook on life, because while costly and inconvenient, it was actually... funny.
The thing is, when you let every bump in the road send you into a spiral, you’re setting yourself up to see the world as a threat, when it’s actually not. Most of what happens to us in life is genuinely neutral, and we assign events meaning based on our previous experiences and expectations. No wonder it makes you go insane when things don’t go your way. They don’t go your way or the wrong way. They just go.
It took me a lot of effort to retrain my brain in how it reacts to life’s constant ebbs and flows, but I also didn’t force myself to be mindlessly positive about everything. Even though a lot of things are neutral, some of them are pretty shit, and forced positivity is probably just as harmful and exhausting as the spiral itself.
Instead, I tried to tap into curiosity, and treat any situation that isn’t going my way as an invitation to look outside whatever blinders I didn’t know I had on.
“I choose adventure” became my mantra, and my answer to life’s surprises. It's not automatic, at least not yet. I still get frustrated when things don't go my way, probably always will. But it helps me pause and look around, instead of going straight into fight mode with life itself.
Why “adventure”
For me, adventure captures that feeling of possibility, curiosity, and openness to the unknown, the kind that can turn almost anything into something worthwhile without forcing the positivity, because with adventure you genuinely don’t know what’s coming next. It’s about the journey more than the destination.
For other people it might be joy, or accomplishment, or peace, or something else entirely, whatever helps them snap out of reactive mode. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it stops you swimming against a current that was never going to work in your favour anyway.
So if life is neutral (and it is), and we’re the ones assigning meaning to whatever happens, then living on purpose isn’t really about having the plan figured out. It’s about choosing how you see life when it doesn’t go according to that plan.
Designing with life, not against it
I don’t believe that life has an agenda against us, even if it feels that way sometimes. If anything, it turns out that even in the most extreme situations, the people who manage best are the ones who seem to carry a similar mindset. There’s a tragic story about the Donner Party of 1846, the group who survived unimaginable conditions (starvation, extreme cold, instances of survival cannibalism), and this quote from a book about it lives in my head rent-free:
“Survival psychologists have since discovered that the people who are most likely to live through extreme, life-and-death challenges are those who open their eyes to the wonders of the world around them, even as their own lives hang in the balance. To appreciate beauty is to experience humility - to recognise that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment. And humility, it turns out, is key to recognising that in order to survive, you must adapt yourself to your environment, that it won't adapt to your needs. So it seems that Mary Ann Graves carried an advantage with her as she crossed Donner Pass - her attitude. She kept her eyes open; she did not deceive herself. She saw and touched, tasted, smelled, and heard everything that was happening around her, and everything that might.”
The stakes in my life are obviously much lower, but I don’t think the scale changes the underlying idea. The people who make it through anything, big or small, tend to be the ones who work with life instead of fighting against it. They’re the ones who choose to see and experience beauty (not necessarily mindless positivity) around them.
I don’t want to drag myself through life feeling like everything out there is out to get me. At the end of it all (hopefully a very long way off), I want to feel like I’m coming home from an adventure, full of stories to share, full of the emotions and impressions of the journey, like getting back from a family road trip, weary, but so full.
And if I keep choosing to see the whole thing as an adventure, I think life tends to follow.
Thank you for reading!
