How are you enjoying your wonderful life today? I dearly wish you a happy awareness of many lovely things in your world, your home and your valuable contribution to them.
For example, two women want to go to college and the price is $40k. One draws the money from a trust fund the day after the thought occurs to her and, shazzam! she enrolls. The other, who believes that everything she gets must be gotten through hard, very hard work, saves her pennies year after year until she has fulfilled the price she set before she allows herself to enroll. I say it is the price she set, for with that mindset of it being a hard thing to do, she may never have allowed herself to explore grants, student loans, financial aid. She may never have made an appointment with a counselor to see what other ways she could take to get into college soon after the idea came to her mind. She may never have talked with her family, her friends, or the countless other people around her who might have joyfully shared their understanding, their connections and their money to help her dream bloom.
This, I think, is because when we make up stories about our own lives, we fall into them like zombies in a trance. As a trained hypnotherapist, I have become convinced that the most powerful hypnotic voice each of us ever hears is our own, and the most potent statements we accept without question are those that begin with “I am…” “I believe…” ”I think…” and “I know….” If we don’t ask ourselves frequently, “Am I writing a story I really want to live?” we inadvertently, yet devotedly, act out in whatever way we can to prove our story is true.
Today, I was also contemplating the idea that no one is really ever afraid to succeed. We avoid the success of our desires because we have unwittingly imagined equal or greater unwelcome experiences attached to those desires. For instance, a person may want to become a great movie star, but she may fear that along with all the goodness she envisions, she must also lose her privacy, she must remain rail-thin at the expense of her health and her current love of Ben & Jerry’s, her marriage will not last the pressure. And, it seems to me, where these stories of the “dark side” of success come from is the incessant gossip in popular media about those who do succeed. My cultural upbringing taught me to soak this in from morning until bedtime by waking to the clock radio, reading magazines and listening to community gossip, never missing the evening news or the daily paper, all of them full of commentary on the faults and failures of people who dared to be successful.
Now, it seems that the “price” for that investment in listening to and, especially, in passing along these stories about people we don’t know, is that when we write our own stories about our own yearning desires, we link the public disgraces and humiliations, the burdens and heartache we read about in the lives of famous people to the achievement of any and all success. And this becomes the price we attach to our own hopes for a fulfilled and well-lived life. This, in turn, makes every step toward our goals taken with dread and apprehension. That, or we abandon our dreams altogether because we have invested more faith in the conflicted story we made up than in the hope of the pure dream, a dream that wanted only to take us into being the finest most fully manifested unique and wonderful person we were born to be.
We hold ourselves back, remaining in a life and circumstances we may not like, but a place where we know we can pay the daily price. Or so we delude ourselves into thinking. However, the curtain falls sooner or later on everyone’s human performance. One cannot forestall this by staying inside her house with the remote and Orville Redenbacher while watching the lives of others being dissed on the nightly news. The news anchor may be ridiculing someone who was caught in an affair, whose recent movie was panned by the critics, who was not chosen for the Houston Astros. And all the while the people being gossiped about as well as the people watching the show will have a final bow and the curtain will come down. The question then is, on which side of that commentary would you rather be? It is useless to imagine making the world free of gossip; it is just one of the gazillion games to play on this planet. However, it may serve the one who wishes to live a bold and deeply satisfying life to step out of that game — forever.
The big question for me now is, “If I lived in a vacuum, what would I do with the time I have left?” By that, I mean if there were no one watching and no one ever to brag to about my choice, how would I invest my money, my time, my creativity, my love?
Today, my new Thot is, “Did it ever occur to you that the purpose of your life is to enjoy your own company as you explore this world of infinite wonders? Really. To actually wake and walk and contemplate your own experiences in happy communion with yourself. Can you allow yourself one day of this now?”