Some of us create stories, invent drama; we envelop ourselves within thick, black clouds of heaviness. Other push everything under the carpet, constantly convincing themselves that everything is (or will be) fine, that life is amazing and pain doesn’t exist.
We either cry too much or not at all. Eat too much, or not enough. We think too much about everything and not enough about the right things. We live in the future and dwell on the past, ignoring the Now. We are seldom happy and, even when something happens that makes us happy, it is quickly forgotten when a new moment comes into our lives. We fear death but make no effort to really live. We postpone everything, only to do nothing in the end. We are constantly on the move, finding new pleasures and goals, simply to avoid dealing with things Now.
We are either convincing ourselves we are perfect or struggle to see anything but flaws our mind imposes on us. We smile when we think we need to, or simply when we see others smile. It is easier to create a reason to hate someone than it is to see a million other reasons to forgive, or at least talk and communicate. It is so easy to close our hearts and so difficult to observe our mind and see the games it plays.
We worry about the future so much we don’t even notice the solutions presenting themselves at this moment now. We compare ourselves to others… our bodies, our possessions, cars, houses, clothes, mobile phones; our measures of “success”.
Our lives are all about getting somewhere, completing something, learning, improving, changing – always something in the future, always something more to add to our notion of ourselves in order to “grow” and “be better”.
We are only fully relaxed and natural when we are alone or with our pets, between our four walls, if even then. We see intention in other people’s mistakes, words, and actions, but fail to remember that we have hurt people also, without meaning to.
We create stories, dramas to make us feel more right; to make someone else more wrong. We build our defenses, isolating ourselves from the world, or we suffer all the time because we are so “sensitive” and the world is so “cruel”. We swing between extremes unaware of the peace at the center of it all.
We convince ourselves to live our life in a certain way, because we feel that others expect us to. We make decisions and steer our lives in directions we know are not what our soul cries for, because we don’t want to hurt someone or lack a courage to push through what we believe will be unpleasant situations. We then convince ourselves it is for the best, that it was the only right thing to do, only right way to go.
Why is it so difficult to simply be?
Why don’t we cry when we feel like crying, without identifying ourselves with the emotions that underlay it; why we don’t stop crying when that emotion has been released… stop holding on to it and the suffering it inevitably brings – to allow each new moment to be new and fresh. To let the past be the past, something that has already happened.. and the future to be the future, something that we have no idea what it will be, once it actually becomes the Now.
Why we try so hard to live someone else’s life’s?
It all boils down to being human, in the end. It is in the nature of our minds to compare, seek, analyze, criticize, suffer. We are nothing but slaves to our own minds, when not aware enough. We walk through our lives on auto-pilot, unaware of the games our own mind plays on us. Of course, our mind knows us well, too well. It knows what buttons to press, what feelings to underline, what thoughts to sequence together to create a desired action. It even feels like the right thing to do, unless our hearts intervene. We need our minds, of course. But in a society that only values intellect, deduction, reason and logic, there must be some room left for the matters of heart and spirit. In fact, it should be our priority – to learn to just be. No one teaches us in all our years of education to slow down, to capture Now and ourselves in it, so how could we know anything else but to compare ourselves with others? How could we know we are perfect already, a part of a perfection greater than anything we can imagine? How could we know to look beyond our thoughts, emotions, suffering, to find something pure and powerful, until it either happens by “accident” or out of despair? How could we know that happiness is really right here and now, we only need to embrace it, ourselves and others; situations we’re into and the world around us?
But we do know it… if only for a brief moment or two.
Here’s to that moments.
Here’s to being brave and living our lives fully aware.
Here’s to all the Teachers in our everyday lives.
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