Several books have been written, and we might have seen movies or documentaries, about people whose lives dramatically changed after they had traumatic experiences. There are also people who get to a certain age and start questioning their lives and make drastic changes. And you might very well have had traumatic experiences, or even started questioning your life. Perhaps one of these reasons is why you feel the thirst and are reading this book. Or, perhaps you haven’t yet worked through a traumatic experience. If you’ve not yet had any of these experiences, it’s likely that, at some point in your life, you will find yourself in one of these situations—either the survivor or a near survivor of a harrowing experience, or a person still grappling with a traumatic experience. Or, you might be a person who has reached a point in your life where you don’t feel satisfied.
When we are placed in harsh conditions, for us to survive, we are required to dig deep: We are required to work very hard to save ourselves. If we are lucky, we might even dig deep enough to see our souls. In those books and movies I just mentioned, the changes that happened most likely occurred when the person uncovered their soul and then allowed their soul to guide their lives starting from the traumatic incident.
Yet, if we never have such a life-changing experience, what are we to do if we thirst for a change in our lives?
We can do nothing, and simply live our second-choice existence. Or, we could be brutally honest with ourselves to find out if the life we created is indeed the life we like, or if we are merely caught up in the flow of circumstances that make up our lives. In other words, we can decide to stop and look at our second-choice existences, or we can admit that we cannot or do not have the courage to stop and look at our lives.
The choice can be difficult, because it takes courage to make needed changes in our lives. Courage is needed because those adjustments might take more pain and work than we are willing to put forth. Yet if we decide to do nothing, all that remains is the second-choice existence, with no chance of ever living our first-choice existence.
This latter choice—to do nothing—might be okay for some people, but not okay for others. People who have had difficult and traumatic experiences, and even near death experiences—those who had no choice—often say they feel as if they got a second chance with their lives.
The question is, why wait for a trauma that might never happen? Why not just look at your life right now instead?
In some cases, people recalling their traumatic experience say they saw flashes of their lives. This might have happened to you. Whether or not it has, have you ever considered why this occurs? Why these people see their lives flash by? Why they invariably make life-altering changes? Why they say it seems, to them, that they now have a second chance at their lives?
Could it be that they saw what their lives had come to? Could it be that what they saw, they didn’t like? Could it be that they saw their second-choice existences flash by?
If we look really closely at our lives in an open and honest way, without waiting for a traumatic experience to “force” us to, might we see the same existence as what people who’ve endured traumatic experiences see?
