Develop a Should Free Lifestyle

What’s your motivation? What’s the driving force behind your actions? Is it you or something else or even someone else? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I was thinking about this because something strange happened to me the other day. I had some free time and realized there wasn’t anything I felt compelled to do. No shoulds. There were things I thought of doing, things I was interested in doing, things I wanted to do, but none of them were imperative. I could do them or not do them.

When you’ve lived most of your life according to a long list of shoulds, it’s somewhat disconcerting to find yourself without them one day. You might wonder who you are without an ever present sense of obligation to guide your actions. It can be downright frightening.

Fear of the Unowned

I think the reason this freedom, the very thing we say we crave, can be so scary is because it comes joined at the hip with the realization that we’re responsible for our own choices, our own sense of purpose and meaning, and our own direction. We’re left without anything other than our own heart and mind to point to as an explanation for why we do what we do.

When we feel obligated, we don’t have to think. In a sense, we’re on autopilot. Oh, we might say, I’d love to do something truly creative, meaningful, or inherently rewarding, but I have so many other things I have to do. I’m just so busy saving the world, you see.

But time is all we have, even if we’ve handed it over to something other than our own initiative.

If we choose our own path, we’ll own our successes, but we’ll also own our failures and maybe we’d rather not.

As long as we feel obligated, we don’t have to take ownership. We become owned instead, so we can put the blame on whatever or whoever is owning us.

Well, we can say, of course I would have loved to live more authentically, more creatively, more meaningfully and purposefully but I had mouths to feed, a spouse to keep happy, a family who didn’t support me, a boss who terrorized me, and a teacher who made me feel stupid. There was that thing that happened to me so many years ago that rendered me incapable. There were those decisions I made when I was young that determined my whole unfortunate future. I am handcuffed by my gender, my income, my education.

And these become our stories, the stories of victims and slaves and the thoroughly owned.

Who would we be without these stories? We’d be unowned and have nothing to cling to or hide behind. And it scares us.

Choosing Changes Everything

But if we really want to change our lives, we have to take ownership of our decisions. That is, however, only if we wish to change; we can choose not to choose. That’s a real choice that many people make, one that I made for years. Either way we go, we’re making a choice. Shoulds are merely illusions.

We can live according to our shoulds and nothing much will change other than the natural changes that come from growing another year older and encountering the circumstances we passively find ourselves in. But if we choose choice over obligation, then everything changes. We’re no longer merely being acted upon and reacting. Instead, we’re taking on an active role as the owners of our own lives, the directors of our own actions, and the recipients of the results.

Losing Shoulds, Like Losing Weight, Takes Time

I don’t think you can shed all those shoulds overnight anymore than you can drop twenty pounds in a day. It seems to be a gradual process. You start exercising your decision muscles in order to slowly burn away those rules you’ve been carrying for so long. Burn away one set of rules and you’ll discover another underneath.

Once you’ve shed a healthy number of them, you’ll find it necessary to keep up your regimen to avoid packing on a few more.

We can discuss the best way to rid ourselves of those pesky shoulds in the comments section below, but let me kick things off by suggesting you start with one, simple question.

Whose Desire is it Anyway?

One of my complaints about some self help books I’ve read is that they seem hell bent on convincing readers that dreams have to be huge. There seems to be no room for simpler desires. You can’t just acquire a home; you have to shoot for a mansion. You can’t just be an entrepreneur; you have to be a millionaire. You can’t just be an artist; you have to be a serious artist, whatever that is.

For a while I followed an artist representative on Twitter who was fond of telling artists that if they wanted to be taken seriously or raise their profiles, then they shouldn’t be selling their creations on sites like Ebay or Etsy. “No way!” he would say.

Alright. Fair enough. But what if having a high profile just isn’t that important to the artist? Does that make them less of an artist? I don’t think so. I happen to know a local artist who makes a very good living selling his miniature carvings on Ebay and he’s thrilled to do so. I think he might be less than thrilled if he felt he had to pursue being serious. He seems quite content to be a minor celebrity among his patrons who have collectively given him a 100% positive feedback rating for his work.

Whatever it is you’re pursuing, I think it’s wise to ask yourself why you’re bothering. Is it really your desire in the first place? Or is it someone else’s? Are you trying to fulfill the desires of your parents, your community, your art professor, or the authors on your bookshelf?

Use this as your litmus test. Is it coming from within, or is it coming from some place external and arbitrary? If it’s the latter, why not let it go?

With some practice, you’ll get good at letting go, and the more you let go, the lighter you’ll feel. A should free lifestyle is a playful one filled with curious pursuits and I believe you’ll find you’re far more productive when you’re no longer dragging all those shoulds behind you everywhere you go. But only if you choose to.

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Tagged as: daily practice, Mindfulness