Men and women throughout time have struggled to make sense of life. What is the reason behind the seemingly constant struggle? Why must we continue to do the same things over and over while paradoxically staying in the same place? I’m sure you’ve felt that way from time to time. Get up in the morning. Go to work, go through a days work, with as little trouble as possible. Come home, perhaps stopping at the gym on the way home, or perhaps the corner bar or other place to relax and unwind. The next day, you do the same thing.
I was finishing up a workout once, and a guy with a particularly well defined body which indicated the amount of effort he’d put into it, said
“Well, go home force myself to eat healthy food, watch TV, fall asleep, wake up, go to work come back here, work out, take a shower, and do it all over again.”
There is a character in Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland called the red queen. She tells Alice that in order to stay in place, you have to keep running.
But does it have to be that way? Do you have to do the same thing day in, day out, on some path that you chose how many years ago? Is that the meaning of life? To struggle through elementary school, junior high school, university if that’s your thing, then as Bob Dylan said “twenty years of schoolin and they put you on the day shift.”
It doesn’t have to be that way. One of the reasons humans have catapulted themselves to the front of the line in the race of evolution is our adaptability. The beauty of mother nature is that we can go through life completely oblivious to the idea of having a choice and still manage to have a successful career and family, and produce more copies of ourselves. Which is all mother nature really cares about. She gave us the internal drives and desires that are strong enough so that even if try and ignore them, they will drive us forward. For most of human history, these basic urges have drove humanity to build cities, cathedrals, beautiful works of art.
But what happens when you examine your urges? What happens when instead of blindly following these to eat, make money, have sex, build a family, you not only accept these urges as a natural part of you, but channel them, even harness them, to help you create the life that you want?
What would that be like?