feeltheurge

Feeling an urge and acting on it. Unless it is the urge to move, the urge to go inwards, to journal, most urges don't lead to long-term satisfaction, they lead to short-term gratification. When we act to gain short-term gratification, we normally end up unsatisfied later down the line. Long-term gratification, however, the gratification that takes longer to obtain, to see, to feel, is where true success and contentment lie. When you look at what you need to do to feel this, you realise, that the seeking of short-gratification only leads you further away from who you want to be, where as long-term gratification, your meeker and milder friend, will end up allowing you to find greater contentment.

This balance, this seeking of the long-term is not easy. We are wired to seek short-term gratification, in a society where everything is at our finger tips, to slow down, to implement those habits, the lifestyle, the feelings that seek long-term gratification takes far more work and discipline than the search for the short-term. Short-term gratification is at our finger-tips, our phones, our greatest short-term fixer, instant hit, the junk food that surrounds us, another hit, going out and drinking, hit hit hit. To run away from our lives, to try and find something that will make us feel better instantly. We no longer live in a world of patience. We need comfort now. We need that hit. 

So how do we move against it, how do we start seeking that long-term gratification and try and ignore the urge to continually seek the short-term. Well, potentially to find it, we need to start looking at our habits, the ones we already know that are good for us, deep inside of us, we already know what we should be doing. Yes, it is changing our habits to start doing the ones that truly fill us up but it also about feeling the urge.  

The urge. That urge deep inside of us and not acting on it. The discomfort of the moment, the voice inside your head that is fearful and loud, craving that hit, needing it, that urge. It is sitting with it, it is allowing those thoughts, feelings, ideas to flow through and not acting on it. Even in the greatest discomfort, listening to its words and knowing you don't always need to follow it, allowing it, really feeling it, and seeing it slowly settle. This is so hard. So so hard. When we read articles that tell us to sit with it, it seems easy, all you have to do is sit with your thoughts, anyone can do that right? In a world that has been taught that we don't need to sit with our thoughts, the bad feelings, the fear, instead there are so many ways we can crawl our way out of it, that discomfort, in the short-term anyway. But the strength, the determination and the discipline to sit with it, the urge, the discomfort, the voice in your head, well that, that is where the journey truly starts to change. The journey to contentment, to small joys, to small wins, to pure joy. To a life changing way of seeing the world, your thoughts, your life. The seeking of a long joyous life, that no small hit, is worth it, because you see it, you see the life you want, and that, that small hit, the one that we have been programmed to crave, no longer hits us like it used to.