Thursday, November 20, 2008

The emptiness of the moment

So, it's been quite some while since I sat down to write something here. The reason is pretty simple: I didn't having anything to write about.


Did you ever notice how sometimes, our lives get on such a fast rhythm, that nothing remains constant. The truth of yesterday is the lie of today, what yesterday you liked today doesn't stern any kind of interest inside of you...it's the weirdest thing.

If in case you don't know what I'm talking about, can you recall 3 weeks of your life where one the first you were totally happy, then pretty miserable and happy again on the 3rd week.

Sometimes I get the feeling that my life has a mind of it's own and I'm just a spectator in it.


But enough off this bullshit.


The fact is that we all like to ground our reality in something, so when the situation changes, we have a solid anchor point.

Most of us tie their reality to external elements (I am rich, have a nice car, a good job....this is WHO I AM), the problem with this is that external elements are not fully in our control (think about how many rich people became poor over the past year, due to the global recession). When we tie our reality to external elements, we risk a lot, because they can disappear over night, and our reality, concept of who we are with it.

This is how most of us westerners live our lives, but if you go to Asia, you will notice a different tendency. People have their reality anchored inside of themselves, who they are is not determined by what they poses. So when the exterior world changes, their identity and the perception they have about themselves remain constant.

This perception of life was adopted in the movie Fight Club as well. Some of you might remember this quote from the movie:

"You are not your job.
You are not how much you have in the bank.
You are not the contents of your wallet.
You are not your fucking Khakis.
~Tyler~


This is what I've been trying to achieve during the past few years. Detaching my sense of identity from objects and placing it back into myself where it belongs.

However....there was and is a simple question in my mind:

What the F*** does it mean to place your anchors inside yourself???

It's a weird concept and a hard one at the same time.


The best direction I found was to define my reality, by what I want, what my purpose is, what I believe is right and wrong, how I think I should live my life and other concepts (some of them I mentioned on this blog).

The truth is that finding yourself in yourself, is much much harder than I would have thought...

Whenever I think that: "YES, I'm finally on the right path" Something comes up and makes me realize that at one point I made a mistake in my rationalization.


In the past few months my reality has been challenged quite a lot (thanks to a special friend :) ) and also had a lot of challenges, which resulted in me having to spend time deciding if what I was doing and how I did them, were right or wrong, beneficial or not for me on the long term.

And you know what? On many occasions I realized, that I wasn't doing things the right way and that I need to change things. A couple of times my entire reality was shaken from its roots.


Was it pleasant?...no, not at all.

Was it beneficial for me and my sense of identity/reality?...I sure damn hope so.


The thing I start realizing while I'm writing this post is that, if I want a strong reality and sense of identity, I need to challenge it as hard and as often as possible.



But there's a downside to this.

When you challenge your reality, you will lose many things, including your self confidence and desire to obtain different things.

I presume that you have to balance out how often you push yourself to grow your reality and how often and for how long you take the time to benefit from your reality, before you decide to push it again. You can't do both.


How ever the catch is that you don't really decide, when you are going to be challenged, so you need to know how to handle it.

Will you profit from the challenge and let yourself grow, or will you ignore it for a while and continue doing what you were doing in your current reality.


To be a bit of a social critic, most people tend to do the second and that's why their perception of reality is so so so messed up and bad.

However, it seems that I went a bit overboard and let my reality change way too much recently and let it go a bit out of control? Not sure.


All i know is that, I'm not really sure where I am in my life, what I want to do and where i want to go. And I need to do something about this....I need to find myself again.