Hi everyone, I wanted to share some ideas with you about how to accept living a 50/50 life. I have introduced this concept of a 50/50 life before, but what I want to talk about is how to truly accept this idea, to make it part of how you live your everyday life and why this can be of so much benefit to you if you do. 

So let’s start with what 50/50 means. 50/50 means that something is equally good and bad, likely and unlikely, favorable and unfavorable. 

How do most of you feel when you hear the term 50/50? Does it sound disappointing to you or do you think I have just as good of a shot at something going in my favor as I do with it not going in my favor? How you view the term 50/50 really sets up the foundation of where you’ll start with this concept. 

My former self did not like the odds of 50. I had a belief and persistence that I was in control and could try to achieve at least a 90/10. Well let me tell you I spent years striving for this and it did not take me anywhere good. My mental and physical health suffered. My relationships with my loved ones were affected greatly. I paid the price of living a life of resistance and trying to control everything. 

So let’s open up to this idea of using the 50/50 concept to view our own life. 

The truth is, we are all living a real human experience. And to truly live an authentic human experience that means it must consist of good and bad. Why? Because without the contrast of pain and discomfort we cannot fully experience joy and happiness. Really think about that. I mean our brains tend to tell us the story that ultimately we want to feel happy and good 100% of the time. But if that happened you would have to feel good and happy about very sad and unfortunate things in life. You would have to feel good and happy when you can’t walk like you were doing every day when you get plantar fasciitis and it sticks around for 3 months. Yes, I am talking about me. To want a life that felt 100% or even 90% good all the time I would need to be happy about that. But I am not happy about it. I have just chosen to accept that this scenario is one of the downsides of this 50/50 human life I am living. To want a life that feels good and happy all the time, I would need to convince myself that my fathers recent passing is somehow a positive experience. But it had very complex and troubling factors associated with it. So of course I am not going to want to be inauthentic with myself and just try to convince myself to feel good and happy. I am choosing to accept that life is filled with the ups and downs and that this is what is meant for me. I truly accept it….all the good and all the bad. All the favorable and all the unfavorable. 

By accepting this truly as a philosophy of my life, I allow myself to experience all of it. All of the positive emotions as well as all of the negative emotions. I have learned that I can feel the discomfort of life and I am ok. I can feel any emotion. It will not kill me. It may not feel good in my body but I also know I can get better at feeling if I want to. 

When I truly embraced this 50/50 concept in my life, what did it look like?  I stopped resisting. I stopped trying to control. I stopped trying to script my life. I stopped trying to control others. I stopped avoiding feeling my negative emotions. I learned how to let them all be present, the good and the bad. 

I suffered every time I argued with reality. This shouldn’t be happening, this is bad. This is wrong, it should have gone another way. But this was my life and circumstances right now….whatever that may be. That was my life. And what knowledge do I really have that it wasn’t supposed to happen this way all along?

Making peace with my life being 50/50, lessened my own pain & suffering. 

I accepted that the world isn’t perfect. Human beings aren’t perfect. This life and all its humanity isn’t fair. And I accepted that it is not going to ever be fair. Sometimes, terrible things are going to happen to good people.  Children will become sick and pass away.  There will be accidents. There are things that happen in the world that we can’t control that are not fair. People are going to say and do things that feel very wrong to us. Inappropriate, unacceptable. All of it. 

When we start to believe that this world should be fair we’re going to be unhappy a lot of the time. Because we are arguing with the foundation of life. No one was promised a life without suffering. On the contrary we were told that through struggle and difficulty we will grow. We will evolve. And we will overcome to be a better version of ourselves. 

I have fully accepted that myself and all human beings will have both good and bad within us. There are going to be good parts and bad parts within us. We may very likely show our ugliness 50% of the time. This is life. This is all here to teach us. To teach us to live a good life despite all the negative parts of it. To overcome and show others an example of how to have life hand you a negative circumstance and still keep moving forward as a loving and caring person. 

To not let circumstances define us. To not let it change the goodness and worthiness that lives within us all. 

Many of us try to desperately change the world and people around us so we don’t ever have to feel the discomfort of negativity. But when we can stop and say wait. This is part of the deal. This is part of my human existence. I will choose to be a good person and I will choose to improve what I can in my life and be an example of what can be for others. I will do it from a place of optimism with unconditional love and acceptance not from the discomfort I am resisting and trying to prevent. 

This world will never be without challenges. If I sit around and focus on all those challenges and what feels wrong in this life then I will feel miserable and unhappy. And that is what I will push more of out into the world. But if I accept that this life of mine was not meant to be perfect and that the challenges are here to teach me, to help me grow stronger. To let me be an example to others of how to handle adversity then that is my higher purpose. 

We can have the best of intentions with our motivations, but we must accept that these are our own motivations. Something we created in our own minds. Each and every one of us are having our experience because of our own past experiences, trials, beliefs 

When I wake up each day, I remind myself that today will be a 50/50 day. It releases the pressure for perfection. It allows me to accept that challenges will come and I just get to do my best when they do. I don’t plan ahead and try to script life so closely that I am setting up resistance for what a true authentic human life brings my way. 

I practice thoughts like these:

I am not promised a life without pain & suffering.

My journey is to learn & grow through challenges. 

I am stronger than I realize.

I am learning to be a person that embraces a 50/50 life. 

Good can often come out of difficult circumstances.

I will become stronger through every challenge and adversity. 

I am learning how to be an example of someone that does not challenge what unfolds in my life. 

I ask myself these questions:

How is this challenge here for me, not against me?

Why do I believe life wasn’t supposed to happen exactly the way it is?

What can I learn from this?

What if this was here to teach me something?

How do I want to truly show up in this circumstance?

How can I overcome difficulty and love the way I show up?

So when something doesn’t go the way my primitive brain told me a story that it would, I say to myself, Hey Carisa, it’s all going to be ok. You aren’t writing this script of your life. You are just here experiencing it. You can choose to resist this and feel all the negativity that comes from arguing with reality or you can accept it as it is and tap within yourself to find strength, patience, forgiveness, understanding and compassion. 

When something really bothers me about my life. I get curious and ask myself why? Because I must be in resistance and it must be here to teach me something that I need to know. When I approach life this way I just feel so much better. And when I feel better I am a better person to myself, my family, my friends, strangers that I interact with in my day. 

And what’s so special about this is when we allow ourselves to be right and wrong, good and bad, nice and mean, thoughtful and unthoughtful and we don’t heavily judge ourselves, we can feel better. We feel more at peace. We can feel more connected to others. We feel like we can understand that everyone has an alternate view. And their view is not more important than mine. 

Trying to completely understand another’s view or their story helps us have compassion. And it helps me have more compassion for all of humanity. It helps me back up from being within the tight group of humans that I’m surrounding myself with and allows me to step back and ask why. Why did that person kill that other person? Why did that person go to jail? Why did that person commit the crime? Instead of judging them for what they’ve done, understand it, good and bad, right and wrong.

I rarely get upset anymore, and if I do it is at a level 2 rather than a level 10 that it used to be. 

This is what I want for you. I want to show you how you can transform your life just as I did by believing, practicing and putting into action what it means to accept this 50/50 life we have been given. It requires mindfulness and intentionality but with some patience and practice you can absolutely get there. 

I hope you have found this more in depth explanation of the 50/50 life helpful and that you can take away some specific steps to make it part of your belief system and how you choose to live your life each day. 

Know that everything is in perfect order whether you understand it or not.

Valery Satterwhite