This Desire Limited Me Until I Was in My Mid-20s
But I’m starting to let go of it
I had to get knocked down a few times in life before I internalized this lesson.
When I finally did, I gained clarity, but life seemed more complex.
The lesson
As humans, we desire a reason for things.
Something crazy just happened. We want to know why.
In life, there are plenty of things that are just unexplainable.
That messes with us.
Even if there is no reason as to why something happened, our brains will search for a reason to give the event meaning. We want there to be a clear story in our heads.
We’re searching for a beginning, middle, and end.
The issue that kept coming up for me revolved around one thing.
I was constantly trying to see the world in black and white.
Things were either good or bad. Hot or cold. On or off. Black or white. Big or small.
Maybe you’ve never tried to create such polar opposites in your world. If that’s true, you deserve a gold star and a pat on the back.
The impact
Walking through life wanting everything to fit into two neat little buckets meant that I was overly judgmental and wanted to quickly label things.
Was this experience good or bad? Do I like this person or not? Am I going forward or backward?
These neat little labels rarely line up with reality.
I’ve now realized that most things in life are a beautiful dance in the grey.
A place between light and darkness.
A place that doesn’t definitively go in one direction or the other.
This unknown used to intimidate me. And I would strive for more control.
Control of my environment, control of my time, control of my work.
After some rough wake-up calls, I realized that this was doing more harm than good.
In trying to gain more control, I paradoxically had less control.
My new way of being
Now, I accept that things are very much out of my control.
That doesn’t absolve me from trying to plan or predict things. But it’s more of an acceptance that many things are out of our hands.
I’ve stopped being so quick to judge and put things into their neat little categories.
I’ve now allowed myself to feel lukewarm about people, places, and things.
And that’s alright.
This new way of looking at things has served me well and freed me from a certain level of rigidity that I used to carry with me everywhere in life.
My mind works in weird ways. I’m quite logically oriented and enjoy numbers in a weird way, but am starting to open up to a more creative side that I neglected for decades.
When I finally accepted that my search for definitive answers would be futile, things started to change.
In a world full of uncertainty, I try to find that balance between accepting things as they come and taking action to get myself to where I want to be.
It’s a delicate balance that I will work on for decades to come.
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