How Far Do We See?

Many of us are living a life of self-imposed confinement. We are engaged in an often meaningless routine that fills our days. We are doing the same things over and over finding comfort in boredom and predictability of yet another weekend, month, and year. We think we can expand the boundaries any time we want yet we are barely ever inclined to do so.

It always marvels me to discover that there’s more space for us in this world than we initially claim. It never occurred to me to join a local library – I thought I simply didn’t have time to read. But once I did, it’s amazing how much reading time can be squeezed into one day. So now I devour book after book discovering a parallel universe to my feelings, emotions, and dreams in every one of them. I used to watch whatever was on TV – annoying reality shows interrupted by even more annoying commercials. Then I signed up for Netflix so now I devote my time to watching quality movies that linger with me for days – and that’s the effect a real movie should have on us.

Breaking my weekend routine was a long overdue breakaway as well – I was getting really sick from this feeling of drowning in the household chores. Now we go somewhere every weekend – beach, park, movies. It was a struggle initially since I had to fight down the ever-present excuse that I just want to stay home. Now I anticipate every weekend, making plans, checking the weather. Last weekend we rented a boat on the lake in Central Park, something I’ve never done before even though I’ve lived in New York for 10 years. Why?

Why do keep denying ourselves little pleasures of life that are at hand’s reach? Why are we the ones who limit our experiences? We get really inventive with finding excuses (lack of money, time, mood, company, inspiration, etc.) instead of directing our inventive minds toward eliminating the limits, expanding our territory, establishing more presence in life than this shallow existence. Some people never see the trees, the sky – it’s enough for them to assume it’s all there: all they need to do is to lift up their head and see, which they forget to do day after day.

What Makes the Best of Memories

Sunday. Cozy evening. My son and I are both curled up on the couch reading our books. Well, reading his books, because I am in the middle of “Ghost Camp” from the Goosebumps series he so graciously let me borrow. Suddenly my son jump from the couch, performs a series of weird actions such as holding his breath, spinning, rubbing his tummy and yelling out “1,999”. I pick up his book, read the page it was left open on and sure enough come across a verse containing detailed instructions on how to get back to the past. And my almost-seven-year-old boy believes that after he performs all the crazy steps he will travel back in time. He, who just recently told me that dragons don’t exist. I play along. I say let’s do it over step-by-step… now, hold your breath till you turn blue, spin around fast… He complies with diligence and looks rather disappointed when he is still there in the middle of our living room, things unchanged, year 2010. “Mom, maybe it’s because I didn’t turn blue when holding my breath?”

I smile about it all morning today sitting at work. I am glad childhood found me again through my son. I am happy to retrieve long forgotten experiences and beliefs. Believing in miracles against all odds. I think last night for a brief magic moment I almost expected that the incantation will be followed by … something? Do we really want to be adults all the time? Or are there are occasional moments of doubt and hope that there’s some truth to the most absurd of phantasies? If something is so real in your mind, it doesn’t need to be real in the outside world, it isalready granted some sort of existence by the power of your imagination.

Feel and Fly

My emotional side is not my enemy. It’s my partner who doesn’t always play along. I may choose to get angry with myself for overreacting or find ways to sooth my emotions so that I was still capable of acting. I am so incredulous at times at how nervous the simplest of events make me, disappointed that my reactions are beyond all reasonable limits. Quite annoyed, I throw myself at the rocks, make myself endure unnecessary challenges, trying to toughen up.

How can I succeed if I feel like an ostrich eager to bury my head in sand with each disturbing sign or experience? No matter what exquisite tricks my mind sends to my nerves to make them calm down, they are of little help. When I am nervous I am nervous. With all the embarrassing physical symptoms.

The thing is I have to live with it. I thought that avoidance may ease things for me, but boy was I wrong. It only made me more susceptible to even minor changes, which now leave me shaken and displaced for days.

We all operate in unique ways. Some things we never learn to fully control. Some of us might be too delicate for the harsh world of battles, but the same delicateness makes us feel at home in the world of emotions. We feel beyond the acceptable dimensions, see beyond the horizon, beyond tomorrow. We see between the lines, we absorb the invisible. We, people who feel too much.

Compromise

Being overprotective of yourself can backfire one day. When you closely guard your sense of happiness and avoid doing what makes you unhappy, you create some artificial vacuum – a perfectly customized environment where you can relax and take all your masks off. The problem is you still have to get out of it to deal with real life issues. But being detached from reality for longer bouts of time makes it more and more difficult to re-enter the not-so-friendly environment called life and face the challenges it presents. You can’t wait to go back to your hiding.

They say all the happiness (or unhappiness) is in your head. Regardless of the external circumstances you can maintain your level of happiness with inner peace and calm. Do you trap or free yourself by practicing escapism? Maybe instead of denying the vast chunks that constitute the external life it’s better to learn to co-exist with all of it? No matter how hard you close your eyes and shut your ears there’s no way to keep the noise out completely –it will reach you and bother you, if you are not prepared. Isn’t it easier then to embrace it in some quantity?

Your head is in the clouds but your feet stay firmly on the ground – are both possible?

Decisions

It’s amazing how some challenges may split your personality and provoke the never-ending inner debate, the heated discussion of the pro- and con- opponents, which managed to coexist peacefully in your mind before. The problem is you don’t know who you should side with… On the one hand your ambitious driven side is pushing you forward, to face the challenge, to take the leap, to make a change. You realize that stagnation is almost dangerous to your sanity. And then your defense system issues a response that you are getting too old to chase after victories, big or small, that life is not all about reaching a new mark every single day, sometimes it’s all about just living, pausing mindfully to take in moments, given things, what you have right this second - not some future possibilities from the dream world. So you want just to take this day and live it as it is, grateful and humble, without having to spend it constructing your better tomorrow.

So when all your back-and-forth thinking is put on a scale and what you can see is the equilibrium, you turn to alternative resources. You try to pay more attention to the signs that life is supposed to send to us at times of uncertainty, when we are at the crossroads. Trying to interpret these signs (or what you take for them) drives you crazy because it only confuses you furthermore, clarifying nothing.
In the end you just feel so worn out that you silently scream: I have no answers to anything! I don’t know what the next step should be – I am not even sure if this step is needed! But maybe it’s true that the history is already written? And all this daily hassle is only meant to occupy you but changes nothing, because the time of choices will come when it is scheduled. You breathe out and release the tension that has chained you.

You do you stuff. You try your best to keep all the anxiety away. You trust the highest power that everything will be fine.

When and Where

We frequently feel lost in life. The intense feeling that only yesterday you knew exactly the direction you were moving in but today the knowledge is gone, you are in the unfamiliar surroundings, you don’t know how you ended up here and what your purpose was. And it’s okay because it’s pretty natural to switch directions multiple times in life (it’s more unusual not to), one of those tricks the newly acquired portion of wisdom plays on us: you thought this would make you happy, it didn’t quite – not a big deal, just keep looking.

So when you are stuck in one of those “what’s next?” spans and the answer wouldn’t present itself immediately, you may want to look at your current life from a different angle. Just like on a roller coaster – you climb uphill, and then you pause briefly before you start moving at crazy speed: down, back up, down… non-stop. That pause is life too. As one door closes and the other (others?) has not yet opened, it doesn’t mean that you temporarily ceased existing. Just quite the opposite – you can live very fully even if it’s just in your head. You can do all the pondering you kept postponing till better times. You can learn to make solitude from your enemy to a good friend. And you can catch and enjoy so many previously unnoticed moments simply because you have more time now.

Me? I signed up for a library account and went from occasional reading spells straight to reading fever. I get to absorb all the stories in the world, anything I can get my hands on. Maybe it’s truly a bliss not knowing when and where your life will take another crazy turn, roll out at ever changeable speed, barely leaving you time to catch your breath. For now it’s time to enjoy a rare moment of tranquility. What do you do when you don’t know what tomorrow holds but today you have so much time at your disposal? Do you make use of it when you get to slow down?

When Reality Hits too Hard

It could have been a beautiful life if there was more magic in it. If it stopped being so real and feeling so real but was more like a dreamy fog curling around you, deforming the objects, making them into something else than they initially appear to be. We would look for a hidden meaning in things, sense the important facts of life rather than know them (or think that we know them). Sensual, dreamy, soulful life where unimaginable happens on a daily basis and miracles take a consistent pattern.

We often make a temporary escape into the world of color and form (art), sound (music), dreaming the impossible in real life dreams (fairytales and movies) which provides some relief and inspiration. But if we stay in the real for too long, if we keep reading the news that contain nothing but horror and violence whereas a fairytale book is collecting dust on the shelf, if we devote too much attention to solving everyday problems in order to feed the ever-hungry life-planner inside of us with accomplishments and achievements - our downfall begins.

Your life may feel real but the harshness of this reality hits you hard because there’s nothing to soften the blow – you gave up dreaming, believing in miracles, looking for magic in ordinary things because at some point you figured it’s a waste of time that you cannot afford, because you need this time to acquire real things, things you can touch, store, show off. Reality sucks the soul out of us if consumed in excessive quantity. It needs to be diluted with a hearty portion of fantasy not to extinguish that light in our eyes we used to have in abundance as kids.

It’s better to be a delusional dreamer than a soulless shell, a sleep-eat-work zombie. Don’t bury the child inside of you, let him guide you occasionally into the world of magic where you can feel free to believe in anything worth believing.