Internal Shifting

TODAY. No more excuses. I want to purge my life of superfluous things so that I can effectively reduce not only my carbon footprint but also the amount of things I spend precious time on on a daily basis. Some call it downsizing and re-prioritizing. I call it effective laziness. This is one of the positive life changes that I have been planning on achieving but have not gotten around to. My life is a series of unfinished projects and it is time to pick up the pieces and make something of all of the things that I have gathered in the last 14 years. I moved out of my parents' home at 17 years of age. I am now 31.  I have 14 years worth of accumulated items. I say "have" and not "own" because I also have a significant amount of credit card debt that accounts for why I have not returned to school to finish my philosophy degree. I've purged plenty over the course of the last 14 years but now I'm in a kind of micropurging mode. Everything is important, down to the tiniest detail. I am trying to completely change the way I live my life. I want to move from a period of reflection to a period of actualization. I want to do more things. Go more places. Meet more people. I have an incredible sense of urgency which I did not have before. I want to apply the skills and knowledge that I have accumulated in the last 31 years to do what I was meant to do in the world. I want to give of myself. To be of service. To live out meaning. I no longer am looking for meaning in my life. That was my problem before. I felt like my life was meaningless so I sought out answers. I tried to figure out what the meaning of life was by studying different religions, studying philosophy, reading books obsessively, traveling as much as I could, seeking out new experiences. Yet, instead of figuring life out, I just became better at asking questions. Which only brought about more confusion. But that's when you are making progress. When you feel like you are not. We don't realize that periods in which we feel "stuck" in our lives really mean that we are growing, expanding internally, and that is a great thing. Humans grow internally similarly to Chinese bamboo the way that Paulo Coelho describes in his book, "The Aleph." We, like the bamboo plant, grow internally where no one can yet see the results (the bamboo roots grow under the water where no one can see them) but, eventually, by the time the outward results become visible (the bamboo finally starts to grow on top of the surface of water and continues to grow), we are no longer worried about external results. By that time we have learned gratitude. Gratitude for the beauty inside of our own selves. It is when we discover our own internal beauty that we begin to manifest it outwardly. When we truly begin to love ourselves and our gifts we begin to cultivate them. To enhance them. This is what gratitude does for us. It helps us recognize the good in our lives and causes us to want us to make it better. When we do this, we enhance the quality of our own lives as well as the lives of everyone around us. That is how one gives one's own life meaning. By lighting up the darkness with our own light. By helping others shine their own light on the world. Creating meaning in our lives by giving of ourselves to others is the best way that we can light up the darkness and enhance the happiness of everyone around us. There is already enough misery in the world. It is our moral duty to not only not contribute more misery, but to also help alleviate some misery during the course of our lives, and to also help prevent it in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. I want to continuously create meaning in my life out of compassion, intelligence, and love. I want to take full responsibility for how I live my life so that I can be what Ghandi referred to as "the change I wish to see in the world." The way I will achieve that is by trying to ask myself the right questions so that I can live out my own personal truth. Philosophy did not teach me the meaning of life. It taught me how to ask questions, how to pay attention, and how to deduce whether or not an argument was sound and valid or invalid and therefore untrue. From there I learned how to ask better questions. Now I feel I am capable of answering some of those questions. Those will be the subject of my future blogs. Thank you for reading.

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