Are you doing life, or is life being done to you?

Same week, same fights, same Sunday.

Who’s writing this?

If you’d asked me at thirty, I’d have said: not me. Life was something that happened. The clients arrived, the demands arrived, the moods of the people around me arrived, and I dealt with them, one after another, like weather. I was an unwilling passenger in my own life, and I’d have told you that was just what adult life was. You get on the bus. You don’t get to drive.

Here’s what I think now. We are doing life. All of us, all the time. We just don’t realise it, because most of what we’re doing is on autopilot — reproducing a past we didn’t particularly like, over and over, and then experiencing it as something being done to us.

Watch the loop. Something happens that echoes an old wound — someone’s short with you, someone doesn’t reply, someone asks too much. The old belief fires: people leave, I’m not enough, I have no say. The old behaviour follows: the flinch, the yes, the withdrawal, the manufactured row. And the old outcome arrives, on schedule, confirming the belief. See? The same stuff just keeps happening.

It doesn’t keep happening. You keep making it. Not on purpose — by pattern. The passenger has been driving the whole time, with his eyes shut.

That’s not a blame. It’s the opposite. Because if life is being done to you, there’s nothing to be done. But if you’re doing it — even asleep, even badly — then you can do something else.

Here’s the shift, and it isn’t a big one. It’s a question, asked in the moment: am I choosing this, or is this the pattern choosing? The yes that’s coming out of your mouth — did you consult anyone, or did it come out on its own? The row you’re about to have — is it about tonight, or is it the same row you’ve had for twenty years, with a different cast? The Sunday dread — is it this Monday, or is it every Monday since you were seven?

Nine times out of ten, it’s the pattern. And the moment you can see the pattern as a pattern — not as life, not as fate, not as who you are — you’ve got a hand on the wheel.

I won’t pretend the rest is quick. Changing what’s underneath — the beliefs that run the autopilot — takes years of slow, repetitive, eyes-closed work. But the first step is only this: noticing you were never a passenger. You’ve been the one doing it all along. Which means you’re the one who can do it differently.

I am not an unwilling passenger in my own life. Life is not being done to me. I’m the one doing it. Say that a few times — not as a slogan, as a question — and watch what your body does with it.

If you’ve felt for years that things just keep happening to you, you’re not unlucky and you’re not powerless. You’re asleep at the wheel, like most of us were, and nobody told you the car was yours. It’s not your fault. But you can wake up, and the wheel’s right there.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online — ten minutes of waking up to what’s actually steering. Come and try a session, and see who’s driving.

— Adam