Are you moving in the right direction toward optimal health and happiness? Or are you stuck in traffic?

What’s standing in the way of your achieving your ideal health, happiness, and quality of life?

I was teaching a course at a conference yesterday, and on the drive home, I had a few hours just to sit, think, and reflect.  I was steadily moving along and then suddenly… I hit a traffic jam.  As I was sitting there my frustration began to grow, eager to get home to my family.  I was grateful that I was safe, not involved in an accident, and that I did in fact have a family to go home to.  However, the longer I sat, the more the frustration grew.

Now life’s a journey and not a destination, but are we moving in the direction that we want to?   Or are we stuck in traffic?

Everybody says they value their health and happiness, but how many people are actively pursuing these things?

When someone asks how we’re doing, the instinctive response that most people have is “Not too bad,” or my favorite “I can’t complain...no one would listen anyway.”   But why not “Outstanding!”?

How many of us are stuck in the land of “Not too bad” where things aren’t as good as we’d like them to be, but they’re not causing us agony, and going to the trouble of changing doesn’t seem worth the effort.  We may tell ourselves things like, “Just stay the course” or “Thing are bound to get better eventually”.

But yet we go on day after day, month after month, year after year doing the same things, and not surprisingly…getting the same results.

But we keep thinking that maybe next month, maybe next year, our situation’s gonna improve.  Or worse yet, we just come to accept that this is our lot in life and this is as good as it gets.

This thought process applies so many different areas of our lives.  Our health, our happiness, our careers, our relationships.  Instinctively we tend to move away from pain and toward pleasure, but if there’s no pain, we tend to just stay in place.  Whether that’s physical pain in our back or neck or some other area of our body, or emotional pain such as stress, anxiety, sadness, or depression.  When things are really bad, we change…but otherwise we sit stuck in the traffic jam of “OKAY” while we wait for a tow truck to come clear the accident up ahead so our lives can move on.

Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in the land of “Not too bad” in your life?

Even if you’re not actively hurting, have you ever rolled out of bed in the morning, felt stiff and sore and thought, “I must just be getting old” or “It must be the weather”?

Have you ever been sitting in your chair at work or driving in the car feeling uncomfortable but telling yourself “It’s just the normal back pain?”

Have you woken up feeling sad and telling yourself “I just don’t feel like getting out of bed today, but that’s normal…it’s just my depression acting up”.

What we’re really doing when we tell ourselves, “its just this…”, or “its just that...” is JUSTIFYING to ourselves why its okay not to do anything about it.

If we blame our situation on something outside of our control, then we relieve ourselves of ownership of the outcome….and we sit…In traffic…day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year…secretly longing and suffering in silence.