Navigating Desires and Expectations
How to gain razor sharp clarity on what you want from life
It doesn’t take a near death experience to start looking at the world clearly…
But it certainly helps.
When someone loses nearly everything they may have to write a new story in their minds in order to be reborn and find purpose again.
Perhaps the narrative of their unique struggle is what gives them a sense of meaning.
It works for them because they have been to hell and back.
They’ve embodied the lesson and they want to use their wisdom to help others.
Their learnings become a cautionary tale that can be shared with others who may comprehend the idea but choose, often, to ignore the its application in their own lives.
Wisdom without experience is just information.
If you have never experienced world-collapsing adversity it can be hard to see the lessons of others as little more than fables, platitudes or clichés.
We may recognise the morals of these stories but until we can compartmentalise them in our own frame of reference, they exist purely in abstraction.
Until we have experienced hardships in a concrete way in our own lives, it can be near on impossible to tether these nebulous truths to our own identity.
Instead, they accumulate, adding to the noise around us, muddying the waters of what really matters to us on an individual level.
Real change often arises out of necessity rather than choice and humans are indefatigably creatures of comfort and unquestioning routine.
The regrets of the dying often come from those whose life was not characterised by adversity, but by complacency and the luxury of choice.
Oh, the things that they should, could and would have done if they had not been so unfortunate enough as to have always had a safer and more familiar option in front of then.
This paradox of comfort is well-documented in the age of aggressively algorithmic social media and the never-ending pursuit of self-improvement- but it often brings us no closer to figuring out what it is we really want from life.
Self-help was always meant to be just that — help — to get people out of whichever rut they were stuck in, so that they could move on with their lives.
It was intended to be the wise mage who the hero encounters early on in their journey to refocus them and send them on their way in the right direction.
It was never meant to be the prize of mastery itself.
Self-help gradually became self-improvement and that is a target that never stays still the crosshairs.
So we try to appease the monkey-mind that needs to be busy and always agitating towards something.
We adopt the ever-changing and forever-optimising routines of others as a coping mechanism in the belief that they have it figured out.
It won’t protect you against tragedy, nor hardships, and even achieving these milestones does little to appease you as deep down inside you know that it was never your goal to begin with. .
Those hardships and tragedies that we all must experience are an inevitable part of life and when do do happen harsh truths must be confronted for the first time, regardless of your efforts up to that point.
They may be the best thing that ever happened to you in hindsight, but they should not be glamourised, as is so often the case, as the key that unlocks self-actualisation.
And anyway, why wait for adversity to gain razor sharp clarity on what you, personally, value in life?
Take yourself away for a weekend
(Or better still — a week )
You can only know yourself deeply when there is no one around you to reflect who you think they see.
The most profound revelations about ourselves rarely come from our highlight reel, nor from the validations that we get from others, but from deep within.
These revelations surf the waves of our subconscious and are indecipherable when we are constantly surrounded by noise and frenetic activity.
When you’re at your most lost it’s likely because you’re seriously overstimulated.
You’re navigating a world in which others expectations of you come before your own intuition and with all the magnetic feedback, your internal compass becomes unreliable.
To re-orientate on your own terms you need block out some time for yourself.
Go analogue.
Go far from the chaos and baggage that other people impose on you.
Recharge and examine your finite time and energy.
Take a pilgrimage of the mind
Whilst you’re there, I suggest you to ask yourself these three questions:
How do you spend your money?
If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t — Chuck Palahniuk
We’ve all made purchases that we instantly regret.
Often the reason for our regret is not a financial one but one of a misalignment with what we actually value in life.
Maybe you recognise yourself one or both of these scenarios:
- You’ve saved your pennies and you’re good for it. Yet, somehow after making your purchase you feel jaded with your decision and turn your attention to the next novelty on the list of ‘must-haves’.
- Conversely, maybe you buy something you don’t have the money for but, so you rationalise the discrepancy between your bank account and the price tag as a necessity, when really it isn’t….
The first situation is no doubt the lesser of two evils, but in both instances nothing has been gained because nothing was ever needed.
Instead of being a yardstick to measure up against others, or a tool for compulsive behaviours, money should be the source of freedom from both of those things.
As we get older, the penny slowly drops that we get infinitely more value out of experiential pursuits than material possessions.
When you consciously question your purchases, you strip back your life to its bare, foundational elements.
Under the spotlight, subscriptions and direct debits soon become null and void in our minds and evidence of short-term gratification over longer-term successes seen in naked in plain view shock and astound us for our lack of discipline.
You understand what you need to survive, what you would like in order to be content, what you think you need to fit in and what you lust for to stand out.
Who are you when the expectations of others have been removed?
For many, this question may provoke a lot of unease and soul-searching.
The subtle influence of others and their well meaning intent can germinate in many ways, forging their roots deep within making us not only suggestible, but predisposed towards certain blueprints for life that we never actively chose ourselves.
Simple decisions that were taken years ago on a whim or an off-the-cuff recommendation from someone in your life have created a ripple effect on everything you did thereafter.
Unconsciously you took an opinion to be a truth and ran with it.
Viewing the world around you through this subjective prism has shaded your existence like a colour-by-numbers book.
Only it’s missing half the crayons…
Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Character is everything — Multiple attributions
You may resonate with the parts of you that were influenced by others.
You may have looked up to someone and become the parts of that person that you admire most.
There is merit in the emulation of others for the right reasons.
But there also parts of you that have never been able to be expressed in the hopes of receiving the approbation of others.
There are elements of your shadow that are not integrated because you are convinced that they are too raw to be seen.
When the shadow is neglected it rears its head in fury.
The very thing you tried to hide becomes plain for all to see in its most ugly and petulant form.
When you stop self-censoring and repressing your desires and secrets you integrate your shadow.
You find out who you really are and gain clarity in what you really want.
Which are the activities in your life that prompt flow states?
Our entire sentient experience can roughly be divided into two camps — flow activities and non-flow activities.
When we submit to the drudgery of work that we don’t want to be doing we lose a little part of ourselves.
Even the richest people in the financial sense can bore themselves to death with the work that they only do to maintain the gilded prisons of their own lives.
There will always be activities that we have to engage in involuntarily.
Work is not a necessary evil but a lesson in itself.
It becomes mundane when you count the hours till the end of the day and then count the hours until you have to go back.
Flow activities break the cycle and breathe life into the quotidian.
Kids are great at hitting flow states, particularly in play.
They are not haunted by the spectres of success, reputation and smugness.
Their limitless curiosity and imagination is all they need to be content for a week in the woods.
In flow we get lost in time, we become one with the activity and our sense of self diminishes completely…
Here the ego dissolves — the end goal becomes secondary to the process and as there is no time — there is no deadline.
You know these flow activities in your own life well.
Some of them you have enjoyed since you were seven years old. Others you have discovered as you have grown up.
They don’t just provide respite — they are a whole universe in themselves.
So, what did you do before you had to be something?
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this, you are still becoming. Not being.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Freddie Kift — I write about flow states, travel, languages and navigating the lived experience
