Now that my life is finally slowing down and I have more time to sit alone and muse about life without rushing through it, I've wondered. A lot.
There is no right answer to how to live your life authentically and realistically. Yet I want the answer to this question. I want so desperately to know, yet I have this strange feeling that deep down within my soul, I know the answer without consciously telling myself the answer.
It is as if I am in the dark room, not knowing where the door is and yet I am instinctively moving towards the door, wherever it is.
I've asked myself again and again: have I known the answer to the ultimate question, would I find some measure of comfort in this answer?
I don't know. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is powerful.
I am finding more paradoxes than singularly constant truths in life. My current thoughts about life do not even bear a small resemblance to my thoughts one month earlier or five years earlier. It is altogether bizarre to watch myself simultaneously growing up while having this sense of going backwards.
People I've met in life seem supremely confident with their special answers to the question of living your life authentically and realistically. Nevertheless, in spite of their confidence, in their darkest moments, they confessed their eternal perplexity about life.
Why do we all give out advice about life, acting as if we have seen it all and known it all, while we are forever baffled by the turns and twists of our lives?
I like to think that we all subconsciously want to protect each other from getting burned out by life and encourage each other to take life easily. We all want to see each other finding happiness and love.
We also want to be proven wrong.
Our conscious thoughts and conditioning trained us to see life as an exhausting marathon of trials and errors in all areas of representing and expressing the self within the appropriate boundaries of our society's expectations from our membership. It seems to me that our society--our world--treats us all as if we are the inconveniences rather than gifts to our communities.
We roll our eyes at others' loudness, silence, eruditeness, stupidity, individualism, collectivism, stubbornness, flexibility, and the list goes on.
We cannot win. Yet we all are fighting mightily to win. To win somehow. To win magnificently. To win respect and adoration from other members within our society in spite of experiencing the constant sense of being an inconvenience to them.
This contradicting sense of making ourselves a contribution when we are already a contribution by the sheer existence of our beings fascinates me.
Why do we have to do this?
Please pause here with me. I do not ask you to answer this question. I do not want an automatic answer. Think long and hard about this question . . . why do we do this to ourselves?
Why?
Do we do this to ourselves because we do not love ourselves enough and thus depend upon others to judge the exact amount of the love we deserve based on how we make others happy and loved?
Do we do this to ourselves because we love others so much that we weigh our deserving of love based on how our love is being reciprocated by others?
When I was traveling around the world last year, I was disconcerted by my inability to answer the question: how do I should live my life authentically and realistically?
My ideas and desires for my life are not always perceived as realistic by others. As the result, I often receive advice to get real about my life and to set more concrete goals.
Yet my personal experiences are telling me again and again that my goals must be at least flexible enough to have room for the surprises forever issued by life. How concrete should I get about my goals? How flexible should I be when a surprise pops up and changes the game?
Should I be real when I know life is not real enough? That life is just one big illusion that began from the second I was born and will end at the second I die? What is real, anyway?
And now, what about living authentically? How authentic should I get? Should I speak the truth always? Should I filter my truths in order to be gentle to others and to imply my openness to their truths? How much should I filter my truths?
What is my authentic self? Who am I? Should I even bother to define who I am or just let me be? How far should I go to let myself be without questioning myself? How often should I question myself in order to get better acquainted with myself?
These questions were exhausting me, and over the course of being constantly bewildered by my questions and debates, I found myself growing increasingly despondent and aghast about going on with my life.
What should I do with my life? It seems like a prodigious task just to live and to live without knowing when my life will end.
I could not decide how much I should invest in myself and in which part of myself. I have so many dreams I want to fulfill. I was so afraid that I might not have a chance to fulfill them all.
What if I die tomorrow? What do I want to do today?
What if I die 50 years later? What kinds of long-term plans do I want to initiate today?
Existential crisis major time.
This existential crisis was one of the main reasons I decided to return to the United States after nearly ten months of traveling. I wanted to calm down and confront these questions without constantly changing my surroundings--which constantly triggered even more questions about life.
It took me months to calm down and to accept the ambiguousness of life.
It took me months to finally settle down on the answer I can live with.
Here's my answer, at this very moment: stop thinking so much and take more risks in telling my truth.
I am pushing myself to embrace my ideas and desires and to make them happen. If they mess my life up, so be it. I can always move on and change my way of living. I am reminding myself every day that I am always free to make changes in my life.
I am pushing myself to embrace the challenge of telling my truth. If my truth is too harsh, so be it. I learn and find a better way of sharing my truth. If my truth is too gentle, so be it. I learn and find a better way of insisting on my truth. I am reminding myself every day that my mistakes set me free.
I want to owe up to myself and to owe up to the kind of life I choose.
I want to feel more free and more truthful about how I see life.
I want to stop feeling like an inconvenience to the world and to never apologize for my existence.
I want to be. Just to be in all my beauty and ugliness. To perfect my imperfection.
Dammit, I am whoever, whatever, and however I decide I am.
I am what I dare to be.
