On lowering the baseline, letting go of the perfect plan, and making a life out of what comes next.
I have a way of making life feel a little less difficult.
I lower the default setting.
And I try not to decide the road too far in advance.
Of course, I still make plans. I imagine what might happen. I sketch out little blueprints with predictions and expectations. But life has a habit of ignoring the drawings. It rarely unfolds the way I pictured it. So I have stopped believing that every decision deserves endless deliberation. There is a point at which thinking becomes useful. And then there is a point at which thinking simply becomes another way of being afraid to choose. Once I make a decision, I try not to keep turning around to stare at the road I left behind. The option I did not choose is no longer my answer.
Lowering the Baseline
By lowering the default setting, I mean lowering what I expect life to give me. In a strange way, I have set unhappiness as the baseline. Not disaster. Not despair. Simply the assumption that life does not owe me ease, good luck, or a steady supply of pleasant days. So when I make it through a day without anything particularly bad happening, I am happy. A quiet day is no longer merely ordinary. It becomes a good day. And oddly enough, living this way has made me more satisfied with my life, not less.
When I stop treating good things as the minimum I am entitled to receive, they begin to feel like gifts again.
A kind word.
A meal I enjoyed.
A problem that resolved itself.
A day when everyone made it home safely.
A plan that actually worked.
When none of these things feels guaranteed, almost every unexpected kindness in life becomes moving. And gratitude comes more easily.
Give Your Best to the Second-Best
I have always liked the writing and way of thinking of Woong-hyun, Park, a copywriter and a writer at the same time. There is an idea of his I return to often:
Give your best to the second-best.
Most of the life I have lived has probably been made of second choices. Things that were not quite the original plan. Things I arrived at because something else did not work out. But if I give my best to the place I actually landed, that place becomes my life. And strangely enough, years later, I often discover that what looked like the second-best option may have been the best one after all. Not because it was secretly perfect. But because it became mine.
I Am Not Sure We Need One Dream
That is also why I am not entirely convinced that children need to decide on one dream and then spend their lives forcing it into existence. Unless there are three or four things I know for certain I simply cannot do, I would rather leave open the possibility that I could do many things.
When I was young, I read The Little Prince and wanted to become a pilot. Later, while tutoring and working after school, I thought I might become a literature teacher. Then somehow I ended up majoring in linguistics. After graduation, I wandered rather unexpectedly into the mortgage industry. Then a layoff came out of nowhere, and somehow that led me into marketing field.
There is very little narrative consistency in that list. And I think I am fine with that now. The pieces of a life do not have to match perfectly. They only have to become part of you. If a piece can belong to the life you are actually living, then perhaps that is enough to keep going.
Widen the Strike Zone
When I watch baseball, I am always struck by how narrow the strike zone actually is. Life becomes much harder if we make our own strike zone just as narrow.
If there is only one kind of job I can imagine doing,
one city where I can imagine living,
one version of success I am willing to recognize,
one timeline I am willing to accept,
then there are very few pitches I can actually hit.
The narrower the zone, the fewer chances I give myself to make contact. So maybe part of living well is widening it. Not lowering every standard. Not saying yes to everything. Just allowing more possibilities to count.
I often hear people say:
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
I am beginning to think that may be the wrong phrase.
Instead of asking,
What should I do?
maybe the better question is:
What could I try?
Because sometimes you do not know whether something fits until you step into it. You do not know whether you are capable of something until you have actually tried. And many things that look frightening from a distance turn out to be surprisingly manageable once you are inside them. You have to experience that a few times before the vague fear surrounding life begins to loosen its grip. Before that, every unknown road looks enormous. Afterward, you begin to think:
Maybe I could figure that out too.
The Life I Actually Chose
I do not think the goal is to stop caring about decisions. Some choices matter deeply. Some deserve time. But I no longer want to spend so much of my life trying to guarantee the perfect answer before I move. There may not be one. And even if there is, I may not recognize it from where I am standing.
So I would rather choose, live the choice honestly, and see what it becomes.
Give my best to the second-best.
Widen the strike zone.
And stop asking the road I did not take to explain whether I chose correctly.
Because the life I did not choose is not the one I have to live.
This one is.
And if I can give myself fully to it, perhaps one day I will look back and realize that the second-best was never second-best at all.
