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You're already living your best possible life, and I’m here to convince you of that. I know it sounds wild, especially coming from someone like me who has faced some serious challenges. But here's the deal: we often get stuck thinking about all the "what ifs" and imagining that some other version of our lives would be so much better. The truth is, we can’t live those alternatives, and they might not be better at all. So let’s stop comparing our lives to some ideal that doesn’t exist and start embracing what we have right now. Trust me, accepting our current situation can lead us to a more peaceful and fulfilling life.

We may not like the prospect that we are already living the best possible life, but that's the reality. However, it doesn't mean we have to settle for it.

The podcast kicks off with a heartfelt discussion about living our best lives, even when life throws us curveballs. I share my personal journey of navigating paralysis and how it has profoundly changed my outlook on happiness and fulfillment. This isn’t just a tale of struggle; it’s about finding peace and purpose even in challenging circumstances. The main focus of the episode is to challenge the notion that we should constantly strive for a different life. Instead, we should appreciate what we have and recognize that our current situation might just be the best version of our lives. Through my own experiences, I emphasize that it’s easy to get caught up in ‘what if’ scenarios—what if I had taken a different path or made different choices? But the truth is, we can’t live those alternatives, and often, they aren’t as great as we imagine.

As the episode unfolds, I dive deeper into the pitfalls of comparing ourselves to an idealized version of life. We often look at others and think they have it all figured out, but we don’t see their struggles. I share stories from my past, where I had grand dreams and ambitions, but life led me down a different path. This part of the conversation is designed to encourage listeners to reflect on their own lives and understand that every journey is unique. I also touch on the idea that the alternatives we fantasize about are often viewed through rose-colored glasses. We can easily overlook the challenges that come with those dreams and the fact that they might not lead to greater happiness.

In closing, I urge everyone to embrace their current life and to stop longing for an alternate reality. Happiness isn’t found in what could have been; it’s found in acceptance and appreciation for the here and now. I encourage listeners to let go of the ‘should haves’ and instead focus on the beauty of their existing lives. The episode wraps up with a powerful reminder that inner peace is attainable when we stop chasing illusions of perfection and start living in the moment.

Takeaways:

• Even in tough situations, it's essential to recognize that you're living your best life right now.
• Comparing your life to imagined alternatives can lead to dissatisfaction and unhappiness, so embrace your current reality.
• Life's challenges, like my paralysis, can help us appreciate what we have and the journey we're on.
• We often don't know if the alternative paths we think about would actually be better for us.

Hey, welcome to my podcast, Stillness in the Storms.

I'm Stephen Webb, your host, the sometimes known as the inner peace guy, because I help people have a little inner peace.

For this podcast, I want to convince you that you're already living your best possible life.

Yeah, really.

You know me, sit here paralyzed, I can't walk, my arms have got limited function, I got a bit of a sore throat at the moment.

And I'm now going to convince you that I'm already living my best possible life.

Really?

Yeah.

Let's dive in.

So, okay, before my accident, if anybody had come and said to me that your life's going to end up paralyzed and you're not going to walk and you're going to have all these problems, you're going to have autonomic dysreflexia, which in short is a life threatening condition that if something goes wrong below my level of injury.

So an ingrown toenail or I need the toilet or I some, I don't know, a pressure on my knee or something like that that's hurting me and causing me pain or discomfort.

It sends my blood pressure really, really high.

And I'm not talking like 140 over 110 or something.

I'm talking like in the 200s, over 140, 150, like excruciating headache pain, where I go kind of blue.

I start to sweat down one side.

And if it isn't dealt with within about 15, 20 minutes, there is a possibility of a stroke or even worse.

And that can happen virtually any time to me.

And it happens, I don't know, a couple of times a month normally.

And my carers brilliantly just deal with it and everything's fine afterwards.

And I'm here sitting there thinking, well, am I really living the best possible version of my life?

Well, okay, I could be rich, I could be famous, I could be a movie star.

I could be a humble, I don't know, Baker with a large family, living in a really big home.

I could be, I don't know, a police officer.

I could be anything, you know.

But what am I?

I'm a city councillor and I quite enjoy doing that.

I'm a mindfulness, a meditation coach and I help people with that.

I'm a dad.

I was gonna say I'm a partner.

I'm not at the moment, you know, I'm single, I have a roof over my head, I have enough money to pay my bills.

50% of the time, I would say I.

But am I really living the best Possible version of my life.

Yes.

And here's why people often say something like, well, I can see you as been really successful if you hadn't broke your neck, so.

Well, I did break my neck.

And you don't know, I could have been a real asshole and I could have ended up two months later killing someone in a car and ended up in prison.

Yeah, but I don't think that would have happened to you.

Well, you don't know, because I did drive rather fast.

I thought I was invincible.

I was 18 years old, you know, I was doing dumbass things.

I wasn't caring about people.

I wasn't.

I was just caring about my.

My kicks, my gratification.

You know, what happens if I did something worse, where I might have gone into, I don't know, some trade and made a mistake and ended up killing lots of people?

Or what if I ended up finding out that I had a wonderful music voice, which I haven't.

But what happens if somebody liked my dosset tones?

I don't know, my monotone?

There's some bad music out there somewhere.

What if I ended up, you know, inventing something and becoming incredibly rich?

Here's the thing.

We play these what if games all the time.

The truth is, I don't know what all the alternatives were.

I have no idea, because we would never live them.

We don't get the chance to live them.

So while we're thinking about the alternative for something wonderful and amazing, it may not have been.

So when we start to realize that, well, my alternative may not be great.

It's like when we have a general election.

You take now with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the uk.

They're both Republican and conservative, which is quite right wing, both of them.

And their handling of this COVID 19 crisis has been pretty bad.

And you can say it's been pretty bad because you can look at Germany and New Zealand and even Italy and Spain, where they had a real big problem to begin with.

They're really coping and the deaths are.

And the infection rates are massively down compared to us in America.

So we can say that they could have handled this better.

Now then, let's say Trump did not win the election and it was now the Democrats and the Hillary Clinton was in power, let's say, because they're more left wing and more socialists.

They close down the government, they close or close down the shops, they close down the economy and lock down everybody.

But they only lost 5,000 people.

And we closed down this country and we lost 2,000 people.

Meanwhile, we've destroyed the economies because every country in the world destroyed their economies.

There isn't one economy that's thriving right now.

But because we didn't see the alternative, the Democrats and Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour would be finished in this country right now.

They wouldn't be able to coming the November election in America, the Republicans would get in a massive majority because no one would have seen the alternative.

No one would have known what would have happened if Trump had got in.

So we tend to see the alternative through rose tinted glasses.

What if Hillary was in?

We had a lot less deaths.

Well, you wouldn't have had a lot.

You would have had a lot less deaths, but you wouldn't have known you had less deaths because you wouldn't have known the alternative.

We do have the gift at the moment of other countries messing it up so we can compare.

But what if every country done incredibly well and we only had 80,000 deaths in the whole world?

Think about that for a moment.

Every single country locked down and we destroyed the world's economies, businesses went under, everything went terribly wrong economically, but it went really well.

Regarding we managed to squash it, maybe even just 10,000 deaths worldwide.

We wouldn't have any country or anywhere to compare ourselves to to say we did a good job.

Instead, everybody would be screaming about the economy, about their jobs, about all the other things because they wouldn't know of how bad it could have been.

You see where I'm going?

We don't know that the alternative would necessarily be better.

But when we're running late in the car, driving somewhere and someone cuts us up or someone stops us in our journey or doesn't let us out and we end up late for the appointment, we're pissed off, we're mad, we're annoyed.

Because if that didn't happen, we think we'd be on time for the appointment, we wouldn't be stressed, we wouldn't get anxious, I wouldn't have missed that bargain or whatever reason.

We look at it as we would have been on time and everything would have worked out perfect.

Well, that's just bs.

No, we don't know.

Everything would have worked out perfect.

What if that traffic jam has saved you from a terrible accident, but you would never have known that accident would have existed without the traffic jam.

You know, it really is that looking through our alternative through rose tinted glasses.

So if I sit here and look at my life right now and I constantly think that my other life, the one in my head, the one I imagine would be better, I'm going to Be miserable.

If I think that if my long term partner hadn't cheated on me, I'd be miserable.

Well, if they hadn't cheated on me, we'd be living happily ever after.

No, I wouldn't have had other girlfriends.

I wouldn't have had other fun, would I?

You know, perhaps I would have stayed with that other person and lived happily ever after.

But we don't know.

That's the point.

And when I hit the lowest point in my life, I was at the lowest point in my life.

Not because my life was bad, but it was because I had in my mind an alternative of what I thought it was going to be.

I was going to get married, live happily ever after, never have to date again, never have to get.

I had my perfect partner, my perfect life, my perfect, perfect, perfect scenario.

And truth was, it wasn't perfect at all.

But it was the one I had.

And I wasn't looking after the one I had.

I was so focused on other alternatives, other versions.

The grass is green on the other side.

It isn't water, the grass on your side.

You know, the alternative of not breaking my neck is not necessarily better.

The alternative of not having uprising and riots is not always better.

If this bad thing did not happen, life would have been perfect.

Well, that's just, it's just an illusion way of thinking.

It doesn't work.

You know, the truth is we don't have a magic time machine.

We cannot go back and change it.

We cannot sample the alternative.

You know, we're miserable now partly because we have too much choice.

I go in a supermarket and I see all the toothpaste and I'm like, okay, I gotta decide.

Do I want minty fresh breath, white breath?

Do I want foaming toothpaste?

Do I want little beads in it?

Do I want it in a long tube, a stand up tube?

Do I want it in eco packaging or not?

Do I want charcoal in it?

And I'm like, oh, come on, I don't know, why can't we just have 3 toothpaste?

Expensive whitening and something else.

Look after your gums, make it easy.

Because when there's three to five items, I can make a reasonable decision to which one I think is the right choice for me.

But when there's 20 or 30, I'm like, I can't make the right choice for me.

So then when we come away with the picture we bore or, or the wallpaper we chose the carpet, the insurance premium we just took out, you know, the toothpaste we just bought, we're looking at alternatives, thinking, well, maybe that one was good.

Maybe just that one, maybe.

So we're not even happy with what we're buying now.

You know, I was on the way over to my partner's at one point and I said to her, you know, your toilet loot seat is broken.

And she goes, yeah.

I said, I'll pick one up on the way over.

And she goes, okay.

I just thought it would be easy.

I thought literally I could go to the store, say to my carer, pop in, get a toilet seat, about 20 quid.

And she went in.

You're going have to come in with me.

I was like, why?

I just want a toilet seat.

Oh, you're going to have to come in with me.

There's a choice of everything.

So he went in there.

There was a wall of toilet seats.

I mean, literally, there was more colored toilet seats than there is colors in the spectrum, I'm sure of it.

And not only that, they had toilet seats that were see through.

So you decide on a color, then you got the material.

Oh, wait a minute.

A wooden one.

That'd be warm on my bum.

I'll go for that one.

Ah, wait a minute.

Is porous.

Ah, wait a minute.

It's the little money.

Ah.

She hasn't got nothing else wood in her room.

So take the wooden one out.

Oh, plastic one.

Yeah, but that'd be cold.

Okay.

Oh, I. Yeah, I picked up just a white one.

That's the end of that story.

I literally was paralyzed by choice.

And that's the problem.

Now we're looking at our lives in a way that we're seeing lots of different alternatives.

That if I bought that car, if I said yes to that person, if I message that person, if I stayed with that person, you know, you don't have all those alternatives.

Once you made a decision.

Once you're in, once this moment has arise, you don't have the privilege.

Without a DeLorean, you don't have the privilege of changing this moment.

You know, if you think you can change this moment, do this for me.

Just take a deep breath, close your eyes.

Imagine yourself on a nice beach.

The waves coming in, the waves going out.

And as we're aware of our breath and the waves happening and the lovely beach with the sun on your face, the birds in the sky.

Now open your eyes.

Are you on the beach?

No.

No.

The point is, if we're going to be now miserable because we're not on the beach, that's why we're.

That's why we're Struggling because in our minds, we want to be living a certain way.

We open our eyes and we're not living that way, so we're miserable.

This is why you are living the best possible version of your life right now.

Because if you embrace that, you'll stop looking for alternatives.

You'll stop looking for the wonderful, magic life that's going to be happy for you.

You'll stop longing and desiring a difference.

It's okay to have preferences for what you want in this life.

I like to go to concerts.

I like intimacy.

I like having fun.

I like reading a good book.

I like music.

Nothing wrong with having those desires and enjoy them, embrace them.

But don't constantly look at your life and see that I should have lived a different life.

I should have stayed with that person.

I should have, should have, should have.

It'll just make you miserable.

It will just drain you.

So accept this moment and go, do you know what?

The thinner version, the richer, the healthier, the one that's living in a different country, none of them are possible right now.

The only life possible right now is the one you have sitting here listening to this podcast.

That's it.

None of the other are available to you.

None of them.

So embrace and accept this one and do what you will with this one, rather than denying this one and trying to live some other life.

I'm Stephen Web and thank you for listening to my podcast.

I hope you subscribe and.

And I'd love to hear from you.

Head over there and click on the Contact Me.

I'd love to know what you think of my podcast.

So if you've seen this on Facebook or anywhere else, you know, just connect with me.

Connect with me.

And then I'm just interested.

Has this changed the way you see life?

Does it change your perspective on things?

The thing is, the alternative is not always better.

The alternative could be a lot worse.

Stop trying to live there.

Anyway, take care.

Namaste, and thank you for listening to my podcast.

You can head over to my website, StephenWeb.com and start your journey.

Just a little more inner peace.

Take care, guys.

Namaste, Sam.