May 27, 2026- Engineering our lives

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

~Kahlil Gibran

Our true values don’t show up in what we say or even what we think. Our actions reveal our values, whether we like it or not. If we find that our behaviors point to values that the best version of us would not have, it is time to be intentional in making changes.

Does our environment compel us to do some things we would rather not do? Yes, but much of our environment is created by our own choices – the places we decide to go, the work we choose to do, the friends we choose to devote our time and energy to. If we have bad influences in our lives, we probably chose them. That, too, reveals our values.

We do not need to live our lives trying to prove that we are unfailingly virtuous. We need to decide whether our actions align with our intentions. When they don’t, we must accept that the incongruence doesn’t come from outside forces, but from internal choices. We must own our actions and our reactions.

The choices we make pay tribute to our future selves. In engineering our own lives, we create our contribution to the world around us. We owe it to ourselves and to the universe to be the best version of us we can be. We are the ones calling the shots in our lives. We have the agency to go on doing what we’ve always done or to make a meaningful change. We all have the power.