Josh Allred's Blog

Is it someone’s fault that they have been diagnosed with cancer?

Difficult to say. It’s an unpopular opinion to blame a six-year-old for a brain tumor. And yet, as a culture, we have way less empathy for the 50-year chain smoker. There is so much variance because of the choices we make, the resources we have, what we have been taught, the genetic cards we have been dealt with, and the environment we interact in…

Here’s the thing, there is always a line of reasons we can choose to believe where the circumstances are not our fault. We are a victim of what is happening around us. We are overwhelmed by the amount decisions we have to make on a daily basis. Sometimes we roll the dice and lose. However, there is an alternative. A radical one. You can choose to take responsibility for all your actions.

The first approach may temporarily make us feel better. But when we take responsibility, even for the things we feel are not our fault, we are also saying we can take responsibility to change our circumstances.

This is powerful. It means you can act upon the world and not just be a passenger.

At the same time, this is so difficult to do. Not everyone is going to embrace this. Perhaps, grief is so painful, this is impossible to do. And I get that. This post isn’t to minimize people’s suffering. Instead, it’s written to highlight that we are also not victims of our circumstances if we choose. And when we have choices it means we can make different ones.

Life is out of control, and taking the little responsibility we have may be all we got. When we take responsibility, it changes our posture and how we walk through this life.

Love is more powerful than reason. And so is belief.

We can believe in something so much that we distort the facts to fit the narrative rather than change it.

Love and belief can get in the way of seeing things as they are because we so much want to see things as we are.

When we say yes, we are opening doors of possibility.

Possibility begets more possibility.

When we say no, that’s it. No more possibility. We close the loop and what we have in front of us is final.

Every morning, we wake up and act on the decisions of yesterday. We go to the job we are supposed to be at, finish the reports, clock out and head home. Only to repeat the cycle again tomorrow. We should be clear, that is a decision we make. We often feel trapped because the friction to make life changes (like moving jobs) is too difficult to do. Too painful and so we insist that this is where we are and must be.

Flip this around.

Every morning, you wake up and make choice. To be here and now. To say yes. To open possibility. When you decide to be where you are, you might be surprised to discover, things are more open than you originally thought.

And when you can say yes to the present, you can begin to build the confidence to say yes to something much bigger in the future.

It’s easy to confuse what is and what ought to be when things have worked out in your favor.

That’s why everyone who grew up with money has an opinion to fix poverty. It worked for me, why couldn’t it work for them? Yet, if you grew up with money, you can only imagine life without means.

It’s difficult to say what you would do if you weren’t taught money was a tool or grew up in an environment where you weren’t told to believe in yourself. How can you ever take chances if you never had the resources to survive your mistakes? Half the U.S. doesn’t even vote and yet what would it be like to live under a dictatorship?

Our path to safety and security and equality is far different from everyone else’s. Instead of judging the decisions of others, we would be better served to be curious, ask questions, and grab a shovel (get to work).

Because we often confuse our timelines.

None of us live forever so clearly the pain, discomfort, and disappointment we feel are all simply a current state of things. Ironically, constantly changing. When we seek joy, we are suffering because we know it will eventually be gone. And when we are suffering, we think this will last forever. It’s a vicious cycle.

So when we are bored at work, counting the minutes until we can go home, we might feel like this will last forever even though logically it won’t.

The same can be said when we use words like “never”, “always”, and “impossible” when in fact we should clarify the state we are in as “sometimes”, “soon”, and “improbable”.

Problems have solutions. Otherwise, we are asking for gravity to stop obeying the universe’s laws. So if it’s a narration, a story we are telling about our feelings, well, that can change.

The challenge is that people’s minds are not made for problems on such a large scale. It’s hard to imagine the change that would need to occur to solve the dire needs of the world because we have been indoctrinated to think small. Comfortable with the devil we know rather than venture into the void. Hence, it can be a relief to gripe about the boss again. It’s what we know how to do!

The answer is to expand our imagination. There is magic in thinking bigger. When we think bigger than ourselves, we begin to solve problems bigger than ourselves.

Safety is never a permanent state of affairs. The world is too chaotic and unpredictable. When we feel that comfort of security, the next thing we worry about is, “When will this end?”

Perhaps, we should ignore the security blanket and instead embrace what comes next.

We’re thankful for the downs when we are up.

And we’re thankful for the ups when we are down.

We should be quick to apologize when we have offended someone or wronged them. There should be an expression of remorse and want to change and grow from the mistake.

I used to apologize for everything. That’s what happens sometimes when you grow up in a house of violence. You want to keep the peace or think everything is your fault.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but you don’t need to apologize for every mistake you make. Not every piece of miscommunication needs to be amended. Often times there’s room for something else–a “thank you.”

Instead of being sorry for showing up late, you can extend a “Thank you for being patient.”

Instead of apologizing for not getting to the dishes and your partner does them you can respond with, “Thank you for being so thoughtful.”

Instead of saying sorry for not showing up to dinner without a bottle of wine, thank the host for such a wonderful evening.

You don’t need to feel an obligation to pay back every single debt you accumulate. By saying “thank you,” we are accepting others’ generosity. When we do this a miracle begins to happen: connection.

We are all worthy of love and connection.

We think that it means, particularly the next generation of teenagers, that we should be happy all the time.

This isn’t true.

If you talk to a devoted multi-generational firefighter, they are not always happy. Even if they love being a firefighter, firefighters have to do work that is really hard to do. That’s what makes being a firefighter.

The pursuit isn’t for happiness but for something more meaningful and lasting. Something bigger than ourselves that we can be lost in.