It’s about consent

In doing the Ideal Life Exercise, we are not negating the life we already have. We are not seeking to change the husband we have, the children we have, the home we live in.

We are not here to project ourselves into dreams about handsome princes and castles.

We are here because we want to actively consent to the life that is ours. In so many ways, we feel like we didn’t choose this. We feel like life snuck up on us and it took away who we were, it took away our identity. It turned us into someone that we don’t even recognize any more. It put us into circumstances that we never even wanted.

My goal with the Ideal Life Exercise is to choose. It is to choose what my life is going to look like and who I am going to be in that life.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I do my Ideal Life Exercise in the context of my morning prayer and devotion time.

I am not asking you to believe in anything…the only thing I am truly asking you to believe in right now is that you have a future.

However. For those of you that do believe: The Ideal Life Exercise is my way of giving consent to God to go into those little areas of my life in which, honestly, I have trouble believing he might be interested, or the areas where, honestly, sometimes, I don’t really want his input.

But by telling him, for example, that In my Ideal Life I am a person who has an awesome sex life, I am giving him consent to come into that part of my life and start changing me and start changing my thoughts, so that I can become that person.

If that speaks to you at all, then consider this: The Ideal Life Exercise is a way to invite God into the parts of your life that you have walled off with disbelief.

There is a plan for your life. Sometimes, we get so sidetracked by urgency and disappointment and life that we become unable to see it. At some point, we have to set the counter back to zero and take stock of our circumstances, our situation and our trajectory. We need to be willing to accept that this is where we are starting. Then, we need to actively consent to what comes next.

By, every single day sitting down for five minutes to think about the purpose, the trajectory and the plan for your life, you are no longer simply tossed around by vagaries of life. Because you will have considered who you want to be, you can choose how you react to those vagaries.

It starts by thinking about this: In my Ideal Life, I am a person who….who what?