Last week, I wrote about how, for some of us, waking up hurts. Waking up sometimes means seeing what a mess you’ve made of things (whatever your particular flavour of that is).

This week, I want to write about the good side of waking up: Choices.

Now, I won’t get into the philosophical debate about whether or not free will even exists. Rather, I’ll stay very practical. Someone who is on “autopilot”, sleepwalking, is not making choices. Their actions are based on their conditioning. No-one is driving the bus. Conversely, someone who is awake has the opportunity to choose to walk a different path.

About 15 years ago, I had what is often referred to as a “wake-up call”. During my annual check-up, my doctor told me that my blood pressure was through the roof and I needed to lose at least 100 pounds if I wanted to avoid a heart attack.

Was I happy to hear this news? No way! But it woke me up like a bucket of ice water. I’d been working 2 jobs, about 70 hours a week, to start a new career, and had gradually stopped taking care of my physical health, (including not making time for mindfulness).

Am I happy now that I got that wake-up call? Absolutely! Because although I didn’t like hearing that I was a heart attack waiting to happen, that wake-up call meant I could choose a different way. I started making changes, lost the 100 pounds, brought down my blood pressure, and I’m still here, 15 years later, to write about it.

Waking up showed me where I had landed because of the choices I’d been mindlessly making. That gave me the opportunity to start making different choices. Waking up shows us the starting line, the trailhead that leads in a new direction.

Waking up is like the arrow on the map that says, “You are here.” You may not like it but now, at least, you know.

And knowing “you are here” is super helpful for choosing another direction. If you have a map that doesn’t show you where you are, you can’t choose a direction.

Mindfulness practices give us a chance to look around in awareness – to see where we actually are, to see what’s happening. I think that if I had kept up my mindfulness practices during those career change years, I would have noticed much sooner that I was sacrificing my health.

It’s super valuable to know “you are here”. No matter how much it sucks, it allows us to map a course from where we are to where we want to be.

Waking up means that we can start making choices mindfully and with intention. That’s something that a sleepwalker simply can’t do.