It is often said that you are responsible for your life. Whatever comes of this piece of existence is my accomplishment or my failure. Noted author and speaker, Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940-2015) tells us, “Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It’s not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make: Period!” This is somewhat true, but it is certainly not the whole picture. I think that we must question the totality of this statement. All of us, especially when we are young, are in desperate need of a mentor — someone who can give us a “role model” to pattern our life on. I must understand how to be me; or at the very least, I must learn how to decipher my gifts. These skills are not innate though, I must be taught.
My life: cool and exciting!
The colder season is upon us – winter has begun to intrude into our lives. I find that the weather covers people with a curious psychological pallor. Everyone appears to be more reflective, more contemplative — some deeply immersed in their own thoughts — obviously creating their plan for the unfolding year. This always creates a strange dilemma, doesn’t it? On the one hand, we must answer the question – “When is the best time of my life?”
Your creative imagination will keep your mind alive
We are often caught up in our little moments of reflection and introspection, aren’t we? These are what Marcel Proust (1) describes as moments of involuntary memory, (2) described as an image of a past happening triggered by a chance occurrence. You see a brilliant sunset and you are thrown back to your childhood, for example. If we expand upon this idea, we come to our creative imagination. This is a phenomenon that is encouraged by Sir Ken Robinson in his thesis on how to improve our educational system. (3) This is aptly practiced when we read about a historical person and accidentally stumble upon someone who looks like that character during our long-stance travels, as an illustration.
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Be tricked in youth and wise in old age
Personal fraud: I am absolutely fascinated with those individuals who I have met in my life who have created a totally bogus personality: a completely contrived reality. These are, of course, sociopaths: but they are titillating and somewhat psychologically voyeuristic. They have made and lost millions, courted presidents and kings, been purveyors of the greatest financial empires, only to have been brought to a level of humility by that common curse: fate and just plain bad luck. They regale us with the life that we want to lead. They are especially attractive to the young and impressionable: to my story.
We are responsible for the creation of our own peace.
To my friends, I might appear to be a bit of a curmudgeon. I feel that this is a well-deserved honorific by the time you are over sixty years old. In my heart, however, I am a peaceful, loving man. This misinterpretation of my actions has probably to do with the fact that I am relatively “straight forward.” In any given situation, I always look for the worst possible result to occur. It, of course, never does, but I am ready nonetheless.
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Let us show our style
Do you ever wonder why people look so disheveled and poorly dressed? I do. It is puzzling and perplexing, to say the least. Does that exterior informality mirror a confused and baffled interior? I would think many times, yes. The vast majority of mankind does not know it is alive. This means having the realization that we are capable of controlling and directing our lives. This is not a novel point of view. Since the beginning of recorded time, illustrious poets and thoughtful sages have begged human beings to come awake and realize that they are alive! “With … awakening and enlightenment comes a dramatic reduction of the inner noise of our thought-chatter. In our normal state, this streams through our mind almost constantly — a whirl of associations and images, worries and daydreams that only usually stops when our attention is absorbed in external things.
The time is mine
That little moment in time catches you quite unprepared. What shall I do with it? Shall I shape it into a pleasant and magnificent thought? Should I allow it to plunge me into the greatest depths of despair and frustration? Or, most commonly, could it just flicker and fall away, totally unused – another lost moment in time – my time? I have always been filled with curiosity. It is the same with most of us, I am sure. This fabulous gift of consciousness, we come to find, is not free, unfortunately. It obligates us to discover our purpose — my purpose. Why in the trillions of movements in the heavens was I given life: why me? The answer is because I have a reason for being alive. My individual existence, therefore, has value. But I must unearth my own true path. It is a phenomenal challenge that the weaker folks opt not to accept. They, quite comfortably, settle back into a life of mediocrity, a life that does not question. That is totally all right. Some of us, however, just can’t – you know who you are.
Why am I, my own teacher?
This is most certainly one of the more perplexing questions of our time. It is a perennial one having been with us, I would think, since time immemorial. Socrates (470-399 BC), for example, tells us (to paraphrase) that “to know your self is the beginning of all wisdom.” (1) We are shocked when we realize that we have consciousness and exist in the world. This is comfortable in our adolescence, but as we age, we stumble upon that pervasive and lingering question. “Is everyone like me? Do they think like me? Do they feel like me? Am I awake?” We are then forced to conclude “I only know what I know.” My empirical world is only known to me. I cannot verify the reality of another person. I can guess at what they think or how they feel, but I cannot confirm that others perceive existence in the same way I do. My thoughts, feelings, and intelligence are my own.
It is a long, long journey
It is a given truism that we live in a contemporary culture that presents us with instantaneous images or ideas: success, failure; attractive, repugnant; rich, poor; beautiful, ugly, excellence, mediocrity, etc. I remind myself, however, that I am viewing everything through the lens of history – my history. I have silver on my temples. I have thus learned “how to filter” the necessary philosophical understandings that have brought me to today. Young people, nonetheless, don’t have that benefit. They are simply encouraged to believe that everything fell out of some “magical, ready-made box.” This is especially true with popular modern music. Its blandness, for the most part, is a direct result of the music industry negating our capacity to imagine and create. (1) A basic leveling of quality and artistic output is being presented to the average individual on an ongoing basis. It is relatively easy to pontificate on how “bad things are.” I find that many people want to comment on the great difficulties that Millennials and post-Millennials face, for example. (2)
Laughter negates boredom
I was recently listening to Robert Plant sing “Stairway to Heaven,” the iconic song from the early 1970s. (1) In the melody, he asks, “Does anyone remember laughter?” It is a profound question that cannot be answered simplistically.