What drives you(me)?
I’m going to “clear” my head with hopes that this helps “clear” your head too.
I have been asking myself this question more and more by the day.
It almost seems like my ambitions change by the day. But is that a good thing that I can rely on or should I solidify my reasoning for what I do?
Let’s be realistic. Chances are, you and many like you have recently gone through some hardship. Tis the season with a global pandemic and just general complications. Though, even with having almost died last year, I find myself questioning which direction my life should take now more than ever. My car accident and how I “narrowly” kept myself together can be a topic for another day.
If you’re lucky, you are working and/or have returned back to work, work being whatever provides for you. Unfortunately, for some of you, maybe you still haven’t fully gone back to work. Slightly or at all.
We have all had a lot of time to think where we align ourselves. If you are like me in the US, we’ve all been forced to pick sides or be considered a social deviant not doing your part. Politics and its injustices aside, we have had time to pick how we spend our time for perhaps the first time in our lives.
A lot of us go through the regulars hoops and leaps that we are told to do in able to have a “perfect” life. Going through school, through college, finding a career that pays well enough for a big house and lots of processions, and starting that dream family we “want” to have. Or at least by time we get to this point, we feel like we want it in order to reach the level of happiness that we desire. More often then not, we will choose the high paying job we don’t want over the job that we think we’d enjoy for less money because we are either pressured into taking the job or because we are conditioned from an early age to believe that we need that high paying job in order to be considered successful.
So what drives you(me)?
Is it that passion that we’ve been building since a young age or something that was drilled into us like propaganda?
We all have wants, that’s natural. You can have completely genuine reasons for having a want. For instance, perhaps you want to eat more to build muscle, or maybe you want new tires for your vehicle because the tires you have currently are on their way out. Of course you may also have other less genuine wants. You want a big house just as a power move towards people you don’t like maybe, trapping yourself to prove something to someone you never speak with and have no plans of speaking to.
From the logical perspective I sometimes trap myself in, that is a broken concept with a nullified ending.
Going your whole life in such a way will only lead to regrets. Philosophy and any faith in the background, you only need a cleared mind and general common sense to know that spending your whole life trying to please others is the wrong way to live.
Let’s elaborate on a “clear mind” because none of us have one. We all have the thought that we won’t be accepted for who we are, the only difference is that some of us don’t care and others do. We always wonder if we will be “successful” but little do we all know, success is a relative term and doesn’t mean that to be successful we need to have everything we have ever wanted and tons of money. Philosophy and faith won’t clear your mind either, it may help, but it won’t clear you mind. Those two concepts give us ways to clear our mind, but just because those motivations are in our life, does not mean that we are unnaturally clear headed. Notice how I said “unnaturally,” I use that word strongly in this context not to say that it is actually unnatural but that we reflect on our perfections when we have none. But there are such things as perfect accidents and accidental solutions.
It’s important to remember that we need to have a balance between our logical/analytical mind and our emotional mind.
We’ve evolved with a left and right side of our brains after all. Or if creationism’s your fancy, we still have two different parts of our brain that neurologically proceeds in a certain way because of how our biology is equipped and prepared for such situations.
Do yourself a favor(keeping in mind that I am also telling myself this), make it a habit to perform mentally clearing activities. This practice can be meditating, praying, journaling, anything really. The only important result from this activity is that it helps you as an individual clear your head, not forever, but for a temporary time long enough to help in a small way. Personally, when my head feels beyond cluttered, I will force myself to journal to get any of the heavy bits unloaded from my head. To then finish off the process, I follow journalling with an 8 minute meditation(very specific I know). I meditate for 8 minutes not for any particular reason besides any moment less doesn’t seem to give me a clear head feeling. With meditation, it is about feeling like your mind and body are attached(they are obviously). I can not list the amount of times I have acted on a bodily harm activity to clear my head, as self destructive as that sounds, that’s because it is self destructive. Maybe though, just maybe, we are just trying to feel aligned with ourselves once again.
I hope that by some brutal honesty, you have begun to question the way you let your mind operate on your day to day.
With a little time and little patience, it’ll get better. You just have to keep your motivations and reasonings in check. Someday, if you keep your “clear” head around long enough, you’ll get where you are trying to go.
So.
What drives you(me)?
