I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I believe that life is about struggle.
We’re all wired to strive for love, for belonging, and for meaning. While we’re striving and struggling for love and belonging most of us don’t get right down in there and enjoy that adversity, we want to escape that as soon as possible, and once we’ve escaped we don’t often choose to go back into that state on purpose to find deeper meaning through the struggle. The struggle is the love. Without being with the depth of our grief, we’ll never know the depth of our love.
I know, I know… you’re thinking why the fuck would I put myself back into a bad situation after getting myself out? That’s now what I’m saying. I’m saying we should be intimate with the tension that naturally exists between who we currently are and our future potential or the gap between what we’ve achieved and what we have yet to achieve. A healthy legacy.
I want to identify a couple different approaches to life; one is about finding gratification and/or satisfaction from achieving certain things or accomplishing what we’re driven to do and the other approach is fulfill a purpose or a meaning of existence.
Of course there’s always a need to differentiate between seeking achievements for the sake of satiating our ego and choosing to live in the tension of yearning to understand the meaning of life and how we can serve others more in the world. What I often ask my clients is how will your children’s children remember you?
We have a deep instinct to protect and perpetuate our own. Our own family, tribe, country, religion, football team… you get the point. Out beyond that way of living there’s a possibility to seek the good of the entire world- all people and all beings. I believe the journey there is about understanding our own suffering and gaining the intimacy with our pain, struggle, and suffering. That way we can see that struggle is universal and human.
I also believe that we can graduate from living our lives through achieving to seeking deeper meaning. At a certain point, achieving and accomplishing just don’t deliver fulfillment. It’s what we thought would make us something that we thought we weren’t. After a few cycles of that usually crisis ensues and we know there’s something more. We get glimpses of that when we take the time and make space so that can show up.
There’s plenty more to say but for today that’s enough.