If You Could Choose Again, Would You Choose This Life?
Do you remember the movie Groundhog Day?
Bill Murray wakes up every morning and it’s the same day. Same song on the alarm clock. Same people. Same conversations. Same things happen.
Then he goes to bed, wakes up the next morning and does it all over again.
Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t living our own version of Groundhog Day.
Think about your life.
You get up at about the same time. You have the same morning routine. You eat a lot of the same foods. You drive the same roads. You sit in the same pew at church. You spend time with the same friends. You watch the same kinds of things on TV and read the same kinds of books.
Your weekends start looking the same.
Then your weeks.
Then your months.
Eventually, maybe even your years.
Same ol’. Same ol’.
When Repetition Stops Feeling Like a Choice
When we do the same things over and over again, eventually we can stop seeing them as choices.
They simply become the way things are.
And that can move beyond our routines into the things we think and believe.
That’s just who I am.
That’s how dating is.
That’s what I like.
I could never do that.
That’s not for someone like me.
None of this means you have a bad life. You might really like your life. You might love your friends and adore the place you vacation every year.
That’s not the point.
The point is that somewhere along the way, you may have stopped noticing how much of your life you’ve stopped choosing consciously.
You’ve accumulated a life—a job, a closet, routines, relationships, habits, traditions, opinions, beliefs and ways of spending your time.
And you keep living them.
Not because you’ve deliberately decided, Yes. This is exactly what I want.
But because this is what you do.
This is your life.
This is it.
When “I Wonder…” Becomes “I Already Know”
Think about yourself as a little girl.
You were curious about everything.
What’s under that rock?
How far can we ride our bikes?
Maybe if I tie this towel around my neck like a cape, I really can fly.
We wondered. We explored. We experimented.
We hadn’t already decided that we knew what was possible—or acceptable.
Then we grew up.
We tried things that didn’t work. We got disappointed. We learned that sometimes it’s easier to keep doing what we’ve always done.
Eventually, we got really good at knowing.
I know what I like.
I know what I don’t like.
I know what I’m good at.
I know how this is going to turn out.
I already know.
Except…
What if you don’t?
What if there are things about yourself and your life that you simply haven’t noticed yet?
Curiosity cracks open the door that I already know closed.
It says:
Maybe there’s something here I don’t know yet.
What Curiosity Gives You
Curiosity gives you three incredibly valuable things:
Information. Understanding. Self-awareness.
You can’t know something you haven’t noticed.
Maybe you notice that you feel energized after spending time with a certain friend.
That’s information.
Then curiosity asks, Why do I feel so energized around her?
Now information begins turning into understanding.
And the more you understand your experience of your own life, the more self-aware you become.
You begin to know you, today.
What you enjoy. What matters to you. What you’ve outgrown. What you still love. What you believe. What you might want to question.
Because:
You can’t curate what you haven’t noticed.
Curiosity isn’t asking you to blow up your life and start over.
It’s asking you to notice your life.
Do I Still Choose This?
Here’s one question you can begin getting curious with:
Do I still choose this?
Would I buy this shirt again today?
Would I choose this gym again?
Would I choose to spend my evenings this way?
Would I choose this belief about myself again?
Curiosity does not have a preferred answer.
You may discover, Absolutely. I would choose this again in a heartbeat.
Great. Now you know.
You might discover, No. I don’t think I would choose this again today.
Great. Now you know that too.
Or maybe your answer is, I don’t know.
Also useful.
And discovering that you wouldn’t choose something again does not mean you have to change it.
You learned something about yourself.
That’s all.
Curiosity doesn’t demand, Okay, what are you going to DO about it?
Curiosity says:
Interesting. Tell me more.
Curiosity Can Lead to Very Different Answers
For most of my life, I believed I needed to eat three meals a day and that breakfast was the most important meal.
Except I was often hungry, had mid-afternoon slumps and couldn’t lose the weight I wanted to lose.
Finally, I got curious.
What if I tried something different?
I experimented with intermittent fasting—two meals a day with a 16-hour fast between dinner and my next meal.
I didn’t have to decide to eat that way forever. I could try it and see what happened.
Intermittent fasting turned out to be one of the smartest tools I’ve found for losing weight.
But curiosity has also led me to the opposite answer.
Every morning before Fred wakes up, I spend time reading the Bible and the Book of Mormon. I’ve been continuously reading the Book of Mormon since 2005.
Do I still choose it?
Absolutely.
The practice is familiar, but I’m not the same woman who opened those books 20 years ago. I bring today’s life, questions and experiences with me, and I continue to see things I haven’t seen before.
That’s why curiosity doesn’t have a preferred answer.
Sometimes it helps you discover something new.
Sometimes it helps you recognize the value of something you’ve been choosing all along.
Start With “I Wonder…”
You don’t need to make a list of everything in your life and decide whether you still choose it.
That’s not curiosity.
That’s homework.
Instead, tomorrow as you go through your normal day, notice one thing.
Just one.
And wonder.
I wonder if that’s true?
Do I still choose this?
What is it about this that I love so much?
You don’t need an answer. You don’t need to make a decision. You definitely don’t need to change anything.
Just be willing to move from:
I already know. This is it.
To:
Hmm. I wonder…
Because being curious may be one of the smartest ways to begin creating a life you’re excited to wake up to.