There’s More to Life Than This

There is nothing so responsible as being totally yourself.

What shift in life do you secretly want? What’s that imperfect, blurry sense of what could be that keeps pressing up against your conscious mind, but seems too impossible to move into? Is there some other version of reality in which you often like to imagine yourself?

Maybe you want a shift in purpose. You abashedly want to be a professional Tarot reader but fear the ridicule of your friends with “serious careers.” Or you want to make art all day, but can’t imagine yourself making a living as a professional artist. Maybe it’s about love. You really want a relationship of total devotion, but have been in an estranged marriage for years and know you need to first get divorced. You think it’s too late for you and that you’re too old to begin again. Maybe it’s just about being more honest. You don’t agree with your community’s politics but don’t want to speak up too much and cause drama. Or you’ve come to sense something irrationally spiritual, and are afraid to say it to anyone out loud. There are so many possible ways to feel limited in life.

Are you playing it cool and following a responsible path that you don’t quite love but think you should manage, because it might pay off later? Why not take the leap, and do what you really want? Are you playing games to stay in a relationship that really doesn’t make sense? What’s the point? Whatever your situation, where you feel frustrated or limited, there’s more to life. No matter how much turbulence or risk a true leap of faith implies, nothing could be riskier than denying who you are and what you deeply, viscerally want.

Much of the world is currently in a paranoid, drab and oppressive state because we are afraid. We think living within a sense of limitation and coloring in the lines, following conventional social paths and institutional guidelines, is responsible, or even noble. We think that someone has to take on the mantle and keep things together, being productive in spite of the numbing sense of limitation that the daily grind often means. But deferring to an inner sense of limitation is really never for the best.

This responsibility and propriety isn’t working. Climate change is real. Deforestation, drug wars, mass shootings, inequality: these are all the real problems of a system that isn’t so responsible as it may seem. How important is it to maintain that status quo? With climate change looking almost irreversible, aren’t we at a breaking point?

That’s not to propose violence, or any revolution. Violence and aggression will only bring about a more frustrated and fragmented reality. What is needed is the radical opposite of violence – total sincerity and hope. What do you really want, what do you feel inwardly, what do you believe? How could it be irresponsible to go for it, to start that Tarot job, to believe that you can really fall in love – with a person, a vocation, or the world itself? Hope is not about believing that things will work out, but about allowing them to work out through you: allowing yourself to act from a sense of meaning and possibility, however strange it may look to convention.

Convention is not in itself creative, and it doesn’t bring value to the world. It looks safe, because it’s often comfortable, but it is a subtle way of hiding from yourself, and even oppressing your inner voice. The things we respect most in this world, and that make life good – healthy social structures, inspired education, scientific discovery, valuable technological developments, art – don’t emerge from convention, but from an inward sense of purpose and meaning. A truly healthy community is not one where each member follows the rules, but where each follows their heart, and the idiosyncratic and unpredictable value in each becomes part of an organic group. This is classically expressed in Corinthians: “for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” It is, of course, ironic that a passage about total authenticity is part of a book central to centuries of institutional oppression, but such is the nature and history of a world not yet come to itself.

To point to the limitations of convention is not to propose anarchy, because the absence of rules is not the presence of authenticity. The point is not that the world is better off without rules, but that all that is good in it comes from authenticity, which isn’t aware of convention. Following one’s inner sense may seem weird, but it’s the only way for us, as individuals and a collective, to truly be free.

There is in us a natural, creative impulse of such power and beauty that it often seems fantastical. But it is not fantasy, it’s real. That inner sense of what you want, that buoyancy that you hold back, that “absurd” sense of hope, is your world, and the world, looking to be born through you. There is nothing safe or responsible about oppressing or containing that voice. On the contrary, the only hope for the planet is that we all start living as we truly feel and are. It is the total summation of all of our fears, pains, and small self-limitations that make this current world look dark and disenchanted.

But enchantment is in all of us. We look to childhood as “a time of magic.” We take for granted that adulthood means mundanity and disillusionment. But this is the reality we’re all creating together, and maybe unconsciously perpetuating. Those of us who remember a magical childhood probably experienced in it an abundance of love and sense of possibility. Has all that love and possibility really left our world, or have we just become disconnected from it and stopped engaging with it, becoming cynical and insulating ourselves in rigid ideologies of what is possible for us and what is not?

“In the lover’s heart is a lute

Which plays the melody of longing.

You say he looks crazy —

That’s only because your ears are not tuned

To the music by which he dances.”

– Rumi

If you start saying and doing exactly what you mean, you’ll probably experience a sense of freedom, and periods of remorse, as your internalized ideologies clamp down on you. That’s difficult, but it’s living. The remorse will pass, and life will open a little more each time you come out more truly to who you are (in a way we’re all in the closet). As in a marriage that becomes bland and routine, and too responsible, someone has to make the first move to bring in a sense of joy and play, putting themselves out there a bit and maybe coming up against some resistance. You may be dancing on your own for a while, so practice being, not going. Let your going be a part of your being, not the other way around. Ground your joy in presence, and let that presence come out through enlivened actions and decisions. If each of us does so, little by little, though not without resistance, the dry and harsh contours of our worlds will soften and crumble, reanimated by the life we bring to them, and we’ll find ourselves amidst fluidity, play and possibility.

If you don’t come out, you’ll feel that the world is withholding. You’ll almost inevitably project your self-limitation onto others, because it’s so hard to notice that you yourself are refusing to follow your heart. You’ll see all the reasons that you can’t, and all the reasons that the world is limited and finite. You may even feel frustrated by this piece that doesn’t quite validate the reality of such limitation. You’ll feel trapped and subtly frustrated, and maybe look to comfort and a sense of compensatory gratitude: “things are ok, and it could be worse.” And that may be true, but it could always be worse, and it could also be so much better.

But it’s not really about the external situations in which we find ourselves so much as our inward life. While no outward change will bring the whole satisfaction we seek, it’s not ultimately about “getting anywhere” we’re not already, but ceasing to repress ourselves, and letting ourselves act out of hope in acts big and small. It’s not about the scale or the outcome of the actions, but coming to ourselves through the authenticity that we allow to inspire them.

So, what if you can? What if potential and possibility in this world is infinite? What if that inner guide is moving us towards total fulfillment, and moving this world towards resolution and harmony, but we’re holding ourselves back in the name of sensibility? Can we step out of limiting certainties and let hope work through us? It’s not essentially about “success,” or achievement, but something more lasting, and deeper. A life, and a world, that looks externally like what we are deep within. Connection, love, creativity, joy. What dreams may come?

“It takes courage to enjoy it – the hardcore and the gentle big time sensuality!” – Bjork

Please feel free to get in touch for meditation classes or spiritual counseling over video.