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The following is something I have written for a past self, for a self that was afraid of following his intuitions, afraid of taking risks, afraid of making mistakes, afraid of being honest with himself, afraid of death, and ultimately, afraid of life. It’s something I wouldn’t and would have liked to hear.
Today most of us wake up (some don’t but let’s keep the morbid bit for later). And most of those todays we feel like we already know what the day holds in store. Even if we acknowledge that we can’t know what will happen we usually think and feel and act as if we exactly know what will happen.
But today is anything can happen day.
Today might be the day when you run into the love of your life, or find $1000 in an envelope saying: “Enjoy!”, or decide that enough is enough, walk out on your current life and steer it in a completely different direction, or a bus runs your over, or a meteor hits earth and eliminates us all, or aliens land on the lawn of the white house, or you adopt a puppy.
I think you get the gist.
The point is that we don’t know what will happen. Not in the least.
And yet, we live life as if we’re preparing for a specific trajectory and outcome. We are so entrenched in our hardened habits of thinking, feeling, believing, and acting that we might not even imagine a wholly different way our lives could play out.
And although many of us are not really satisfied with our lives we are too afraid to take some risks. We fear we can mess things up and break our lives. Controlled by this fear we forget that we’re here to make a mess.
What’s the point of living a timid life where you always feel like you’re in some place you don’t belong? Why do most of us approach life as if we have entered the house of our potential future in-laws and don’t dare to make anything resembling a mistake?
The only real mistake we make is living life as if it’s a valuable collectible we’re not supposed to take out of its packaging so that we can resell it for a profit later down the road.
The difference between a valuable collectible and your life is that, in the end, no one will buy your life.
Life was never meant to be polished and presented and compared with other lives so we can ego-jerk ourselves when our life looks better than our neighbors’, or shower ourselves with reprimands and self-blame when our neighbors’ life looks better than ours.
The real question is whose life are you living?
We behave as if there is some upstream audience watching and judging us and our lives just so we can feel real and our lives can have meaning. But this is a big ol’ delusion.
Meaninglessness is as close to a fact as anything can be. But it’s not some nihilistic reason for not living life intimately. It’s a wonderful you-are-free-from-jail card.
Rejoice! Life Has No Meaning
You can do whatever you want. You can live in any way you want. No one is an expert and no one knows more than you.
If you’re not living life the way you want to live right now, you’re playing a risky game.
Quitting your job or burning your house or selling your kids or some such is child’s play in comparison. The risk you’re taking by living a life based on ideas and beliefs you have not chosen might lead you straight into a leading role of a YouTube video of old people who wish they would’ve lived more instead of sheeping along with the herd.
Anything can happen means you might die today.
You might die after reading this piece. There are no guarantees. So what are you doing and why are you doing it? Do you have any idea what is going on? Is that not bothering you, not knowing who or what or where you are?
The day of our deaths is not in some distant future, it’s always today, and yet we play these silly games with each other.
We believe all this bullshit we’re constantly swallowing, digesting, and regurgitating is important. We have to deceive each other instead of telling the truth, we have to tiptoe around issues because someone might be offended, and we have to make sure everyone is cozy and secure in their own delusion.
Have you forgotten that part inside yourself that’s screaming, “What the fuck? What is this life, this world, this society, the vanity, the pretense, the bullshit? Where is the integrity? Where is sincerity? What is real?”
And if all of this is too cynical and heretic then let at least this cliché land for you:
You Might Die Tomorrow
Let yourself be immersed in this thought. Let this be the freedom cry reverberating through your bones and marrow.
Why are so many of us living a life lacking integrity? Why are we not living life the way we want to?
The answer is that we are afraid of death. We are afraid of non-existence.
We are afraid of being nobody, of being rejected, of being failures and outsiders in the eyes of the world. That’s why we constantly try to affirm our existence through all kinds of desperate means, while the barely audible voice keeps screaming, “It’s a lie! It’s all a lie!”
We don’t want to face this deepest fear.
But this fear of death or non-existence is simply another way of saying fear of life. If you’re afraid of death, you’re afraid of life.
You’re afraid of losing your self for life. You’re afraid of letting life do the charioteering, of releasing the illusion of control, or as some would say, of letting Jesus take the wheel.
This, by the way, is not a call to struggle hard to fulfill all your egoistic desires. It’s a call to become real, to know what you really want, to live an internally abundant life.
Of course, your life might not unfold exactly how you have imagined it to unfold. And perhaps exactly this is the issue — that you have imagined life instead of living it.
It’s okay for things to go wrong. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to feel very very bad.
Don’t make this about always feeling good. Make this about dragging all of the parts that have been cooped up in that dark, dingy, cellar out into the sunlight.
Stop the hide and seek.
Speaking of dragging, I think now might be a good point to schlepp this piece out of the raving hole of cynicism and get it into the light of idealism.
Being an Idealist Is Being a Realist
Being an idealist is recognizing that the only way to change the world is to change your own view. Again, this doesn’t mean that everything is always supposed to be easy and according to your expectations. It means no longer seeing the world through a lens of conditioning and unquestioned beliefs.
No matter what your beliefs are, deep down you know we’re playing make-believe. We’re children in a sandbox, playing serious know-it-all grown-ups.
You choose, or rather are conditioned with, a belief system that decides what’s important, what’s possible, how the world works, who you are, who you should be, how to think, how to feel, how to perceive. And this is the lens through which you see the world.
Whether you see a scary, intimidating madhouse, or a fun, exciting playground is up to your beliefs.
So why not get rid of those dusty beliefs and start afresh?
Luka
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