How many times have you felt small, heavy or tight? This definitely is not about weight or checking out clothes in the trial room. This is in between those moments when you had to take decisions. The situations where you felt small or were told “It’s not possible” or things you wanted to but couldn’t or the step you did not take, any place where you chipped your desire because the world wanted you to conform. All those guidelines, rules, do’s and don’ts or rituals which we have been handed over as a periphery to living. Unmindfully, these are assumed to be etched in stone.
How many times you are told or have assumed that there is only one way to do something? The chance of exploration was shut. In the process you chased personalities or rejected them as you were rejected? This formed a pattern of your likes or dislikes. In the process you spent energy and time avoiding or impersonating people.
Dreams are also borrowed these days. Parents leave legacies of unfulfilled dreams as compulsion for the children to somehow dramatically pursue. How many boxes are we going to create and then justify to fit into. The times when you had an option of making a choice but you chose to not to choose. Values are no more than living to please someone or an idea and denying one’s true self in the process. Which lifetime package of religion, culture, cast, ethnicity or ideology have you bought?
We are all in a boxed existence of stereotypes, preconceived notions, fixed ideas, locked point of views, rigid judgments, confined mindsets. Looking at life, experiencing it from someone else’s lens. Someone who claims to be more experienced in going though failures and yet not realising the pattern that failed them. The same pattern is being imposed on the coming ones.
This life is on rent. Borrowed existence from popular belief, standard operating procedures of success, clichés of earning money, boxed careers. We have accepted this status quo, either because of sheer laziness, blind faith or fear. The possible indicators are growing emptiness, life on auto-pilot, chasing sunken goals, loneliness and anything that makes you question your chase.
Who benefits from these walls? Powerful, insecure and the fearful. Is there a new life out there, beyond these silos, boxes or walls? Have you thought of living with no walls of judgments, preconceived notions or points of view, which keep you as prisoners of the past? The infinite vastness of life’s joy will elude us if we keep operating from within the box. As Albert Eintein said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
And he also said “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. What does that mean? We created the problem within the walls, the solution is outside the box, in a fresh new way. Drop the walls, drop the frog-in-the-well way of operating.
It is not difficult to do that. You don’t need someone to guide in case you are lost. Your life story is unique to you and it is not replicable. You create your own reality.
Each one of us is unique. We have one-of-a-kind finger prints, iris recognition, astrological charts. So why take someone else’s solution to solve your life’s problem. Here I would like to quote J Krishnamurti “We are second-hand people’ We are hand me downs of our parents and their parents and their parents…so and so forth. Shadows of shadows with no reality of truth or originality. A made in factory approach. Sure, the question would be what’s wrong in that. But how does your life get any better than those who lived generations before you. What have you created for yourself for which you were created to be unique?
If you haven’t realised and used your power of uniqueness then what good is this gift? It is time to recognise the gift that you are to your life and that you are the only one to bring it out. Realise that it is a completely different story to live your life being whole. Here are few tips.
- Recognise that you are unique.
- Make a note of all those moments when you took a decision. It doesn’t matter what the outcome was.
- Now, recall all those times when you tried to fit into a decision based on somebody else’s judgment, feelings or belief. How did you feel? Did you feel complete, strong, confident?
- If not, then do find out all the things which are blocking you from living your own experiences
- If yes, then write down your strengths and weakness. Work on being independent in managing emotions, confidence and inner conviction.
This is a general guide. Not a sermon or an advice cast in stone. Our endeavour is to focus on the light within each one of us. It shines bright at all times. All required of us is to focus inside from time to time and find that light guiding us.