Quit ‘Shoulding’ yourself

I have used should as a crutch far too often in my life. I should be taller.  I should be thinner; I should be more confident. I should be successful. I should be happier.

The thing with should is that it is an expectation expressed without intentional action to support it.

If I say something 'should' be okay I leave too many things to chance. I give my trust over to a universe that sometimes doesn't make sense. Yes, I should have a good life, all of us should. If we choose to not be intentionally involved in our own life we should expect the effect of our effort to be our reality.

My experience life led me down a lot of roads of pursuits that I should be doing. I should decide on a career, I should go to college, I should read more, I should spend more time with friends. I think about the Radiohead song Fitter Happier. The melancholy and darkness contained in that song matched the experience that I had chasing a life determined by the guidance of other people. Are they bad things? No. But when I never took more than a moment to evaluate if they were things that I wanted I found that I was dissatisfied with the results of a life pursued under the direction of other people.

When I took the time to run all of the ‘shoulds’ though the filter that was me I discovered that yes, I wanted many of them because they aligned with me and who I was and wanted to be. Some of them, I threw out because they didn’t pass the test. Those ‘shoulds’ that I threw out weren’t bad things and they had a place in many good and wonderful lives. Just not in mine.