When life gives you lemons do you make lemonades or is it that you need audacity to ask for something entirely different to change the menu?
Do we become what we think or is it that as we think, we then become? Is It really, “I think, therefore, I am” or rather, “As I think, I am”?
What is the picture of reality if we are honest all the time? In our relationships, if we chose honesty against all odds would we have a greater bond for it or a non-existent safe space? Does honesty need a space to thrive or is it that the more honest we are with ourselves, the easier it becomes to create a space where honesty thrives?
I remember engaging with a friend at the university one day, and it is hard to forget what was said in passing: “I hope I don’t meet the one after I marry”, I have heard so many people refuse to admit out loud that this is a secret fear that is nursed deep down. Facing events that puts one at one’s wit end. Some get here through a near death experience or with grief, for some, it may just be an experience that distorts the reality they have sort of adapted to.
I have often wondered why even good things come to an end? With relationships, is it the lack of love, a high level of intolerance, lack of forgiveness, disdain, disrespect, or dysfunctionality? We often forget that sometimes, it has nothing to do with vices, it may just be combination of decisions, some propelled by fear and insecurity. The need to control things beyond our control, to have certainty against all odds, to have things stay the same even though we know that things ought to change and that change is merely a function of existence.
No one wants to admit that you won’t always feel the same, that life will happen, that you will get curious, that you’d dislike your partner at some point for example, that they’d hurt you ever so often more than anyone else, that you will feel overwhelmed sometimes, that you may come to a cross road with regret, that you may resent paths you have chosen, that you will sometimes want to run away, that the hard times can seem really crushing and eternal no matter how short it is, that sometimes, in this battle, the greatest villain is your vanity and curiosity.
How much of the world you want to take on versus how much of the world you want truly conquer.
Another hurdle in this journey of fear when life is overwhelming is who we’d become after a crisis is over.
For some , it is how they were so sure they were the “faithful” type and then they get the opportunity to test that “faithfulness” and end up flopping miserably, or how you get a big break and it ends up at a dead end. It is how we trade our resilient qualities when life beats us down. Embracing false meekness with the saying “life humbles us all”. when in truth, the real fear is having to push again to be the person you see on the inside everyday as you aspire.
As humans, we desire that life bends to our proclivities, we want a setting where we can be all that we are comfortably. We want a person that likes us for who we are despite the fact that who we are may conflict with who they need. We want lowly moments to be just as picturesque as the high time.
You may ask, “what has all these got to do with fear”? Fear is the whisper in our minds that we are inadequate and incapable, that we will never catch up with our aspirations, that despite our best efforts, nothing good will venture out of our efforts.
The fear simply is that maybe life will end up being bigger than us. That we’d end up on the pitiable side of the story and there’d probably be nothing we can do against it, that we’d not get all the memories and desires we hope for, that we will keep trying and trying to reach a destination but maybe never attain until time runs out, that we’d give out before our dreams materialize, that we will run through our fairytales and end up on the side of nightmare, that life may get really really messy and out of control…
As Marianne Williamson once said “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us”.
Even when we want people to accept us for our darkness or what we seem to term the darkness in us, I think deep down we know we were meant to walk as light, to light up and glow. I think the fear really is that we must conquer ourselves.
The question is how do you show up for a fight when you are also the person you must conquer?
Xoxo,
Dcconnoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 