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“Stop going to your #dark place. The older you get, the more happiness becomes a conscious decision you have to make every day.
You can’t expect to automatically feel good when you wake up. It’s something you have to work toward.”
Ryan O’Connell
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“The truth is, I pretend to be a cynic, but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get.”
Joanna Hoffman
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So. When we get up in the morning it is a decision … it is a decision to not stay down.
In fact.
Every day you decide to get up you have either consciously, or subconsciously, decided that Life was not going to keep you down.
In the grander scheme of things that sure seems like a pretty important decision.
And, yet, we don’t invest a shitload of energy thinking about it.
Most of us think of facing each day as a responsibility.
Kind of a basic survival duty.
I imagine we do so mostly as a sanity tactic.
For if you stay down … don’t get up … you are inevitably faced with the decisions you have made up to that point <as well as the fact you will not be able to pay the bills>. And, to refer to my first quote, this means as you get older you have more and more decisions you will have to face. 
Time is rarely your friend with regard to contemplating your decisions.
I say that because, well, because here is what almost 99% of us do on a daily basis — we decide what we will cede in terms of what we know, or believe, is the right thing to do.
Yeah.
We compromise a little on ‘principles.’ Well. At least our principles.
Sure.
Most of the time it is okay because the organizational, the business, principles give us some slightly-to-more-expansive boundaries from which we can assess what we should do or not do.
But even within that “okay space” we are far too often trapped in the wretched hollow space of a decision of ‘what will you surrender today for the hope of the win tomorrow’ <and the tomorrow may just be something somewhere beyond the horizon>.
Some may call this ‘moral relativism.’ They would most likely be the intellectuals, philosophers and people who don’t really do shit for work in their Life.
For most of us everyday schmucks it is a combination of survival “if I don’t do this I will not get that” and dreamer “I will go ahead and do this because someday………….<fill in blank> “
As we face each day we realize that we are facing more than that day. We realize our actions can suppress our ultimate dreams or they can empower a dream to come to Life, well, not today, but some day in the future.
Now.
None of us really know our future and what it holds so the decision today takes on some sense of urgency of ‘well, this MAY be really fucking important with regard to my survival/dream so I gotta do what I gotta do.’
Whew.
Today can look really huge with regard to tomorrow in this case.
I chuckled <a little painfully> as I typed that last sentence.
I am reminded of what President Bush said in 2008: “abandoned free market principles to save the free market.”
On a daily basis we are faced with questions of “what we will abandon to save our future & our dreams.”
And we do what we feel like we have to do, using principles mostly not as a “stop or go” sign, but rather as some slightly nebulous guardrails we can maneuver around within.
And then we leave to face another day.
When taken on a daily basis it is relatively easy to face the day.
When viewed over a longer term it can become relatively difficult to face the next day. Maybe that is why most of us get up and face the day each & every day – the alternative doesn’t seem so appealing. Maybe that is the ‘dark place’ that we know is there and avoid it the best that we can.
Here is what I know for sure.
Every day you face you have one authority — the authority over your actions and attitudes and behaviors.
You have the authority over what you will do and will not do.
You have the authority over your principles and morals and whether you will abandon them or not.
Uhm.
You should note one key thing on the whole abandoning thing.
Once abandoned is always abandoned.
There is no true ‘just this once’ abandoning of principles. Once crumpled principles are forever wrinkled.
And, yet, it seems like each day we are faced with some choice to surrender our moral authority and cede the principled battlefield under the belief that by doing so “the day will be saved.”
How wrong that thought is. For in surrendering that day we will have already been lost.
Anyway.
Maybe getting up every day has nothing to do with moral relativism and more about just doing the shit you need to do.
Maybe we really are just cucumbers with anxiety.
But.
Maybe it is a little something more we should think about on occasion. Because maybe we are really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get and in our terror as we face each day we lose the one thing which makes our dreams look small – our moral authority & principles.
Ponder.
We ‘get away from it all.’ In other words instead of seeking some ‘how we actually live’ balance in our lives we just step away from the way we live our Life by simply not going lightly <if we typically go hard> or not going go hard <if we typically go lightly> and we don’t do anything other than how we live our Life so, ultimately, we just choose to do nothing to ‘recharge.’
Now.
I sometimes believe we see perfection as a home to move into.
what you have and when you are doing something – context as it were.
It is also sometimes suggested that Life is big & full, therefore, living it fills up so much space and time that if you do just that, live it, you should be satisfied because, what the hell, there isn’t a whole lot more room for anything else because it is so big & full just by living it. This seems to suggest that simply living life, and making it through life, is some achievement in and of itself. I will not argue that simply surviving can be a skill, but that’s kind of like at the bottom of the Maslow expectation in Life pyramid.
laughter that pepper dysfunctional functional family moments.
So. We all need validation.
And, yes, that is a fair worry.
Some people don’t need this often — kind of like maybe once a quarter you receive some validation that you don’t suck as a leader.
We all need some validation on occasion.
time it revolves around words and the use of words.
I feel a need to point out that research says that ‘text speak’ <young people communicating in texts & shortened euphemisms>, rather than harming literacy, could have a positive effect on the way children interact with language. Researchers from Coventry University <published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology> studied children aged between 10 and 12 to understand the impact of text messaging on their language skills. They found that the use of so-called “textisms” could be having a positive impact on reading development.
If we believe for one moment that someone in Shakespearean time wouldn’t look at us today after listening to two 50somethings talk, looking at us like we were crazy <possibly unsophisticated>, maybe even from a different planet, and ‘unwoke’ to their generation, we just haven’t thought about it well enough.
let it out, and shine, and grow. It is kind of like the latin thought of 
born finished and we don’t need others to piece us together and that each of us is strong enough, and born good enough. The thought that all we have is within us.
How many times have we sat back and said “I can do that job”?
business repercussions. Not only may you be out of your depth, but you may actually start making some poor hires who are also out of their depth and that kind of shit gathers negative momentum <down the slippery slope of less-than-competent results>.