To Live Is To Untie Knots, To Sew Dreams, To Weave Stories
Living life is a constant task where you can sew dreams and untie knots, past and present, to move forward with greater freedom. Having a life with meaning implies in turn that we are wise weavers of stories, craftsmen of good relationships and trackers of better spaces and environments where we can continue to grow in happiness, free of dark clouds and cold winds.
Assuming this series of ideas would undoubtedly be a good way to deal much better with those ups and downs that occur in our always complex “here and now”. An illustrative phrase about this is the one that says that “life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but about how well you bounce.”
That is, having a satisfactory reality is a subtle process where knowing how to react in time to adversity, to understand that happiness is not a straight path but an exercise in creativity, reaction, action and survival.
Living life is not just limiting ourselves to exist, we know it, but sometimes we forget it. We are overlooked that standing up as the true protagonists of that scenario that opens up before us every day implies several things. The first is responsibility to yourself. The second is to have passion, enthusiasm, a genuine desire to be, to be and to aspire to better things. The third is to be able to give our lives meaning.
This last term is important and we must remember it. In fact, within the current of positive psychology it is a word that is acquiring much more relevance than the concept of “happiness” itself. The reason? While happiness is often a time-limited and momentary entity, being able to give our reality meaning will offer us something lasting, a reason for being and existing.
Can we live life our way?
We have all thought about it at some time. We have all said to ourselves that nothing can be as satisfying as living life in our own way, at that level of frequency where everything sounds better, in that special tonality where everything shines, as in a Monet painting.
However, if we learn something sooner or later, it is that this is not always possible. Free will is little more than an illusion, and this is so for two reasons: our social context delimits us and our genetic conditioning also delimits us.
Moreover, in the interesting book “ published by several representatives of positive psychology, they tell us that even our own culture tells us how we should be happy, what vital goals we should aspire to and what things we should change about ourselves to achieve that happiness (or rather, a substitute for happiness). Thus, and although sometimes we have the idea that we are completely free to design our lives, it is little more than a fallacy. Because no, we are not always.
There is, for example, the world of advertising, convincing us that we must buy the latest model of such a mobile brand to feel satisfied, there that model of masculine and feminine beauty to which we would all have to aspire to be considered attractive and to be successful … With All this we can see without a doubt that our psychosocial context influences us in an almost decisive way on the way in which we should live our lives.
On the other hand, another aspect that our culture has been instilling in us is the classic idea that happiness equals emotional comfort. Dimensions such as sadness, anger, frustration, failure, or disappointment must be camouflaged or evaded like physical pain is alleviated with a painkiller. It does not matter to know the origin, better limit yourself to silence them, to turn your face as if they were not there.
Yet they are. Negative emotions are part of the human being and of any mammal for a reason. These dimensions are processed in the limbic system to help us survive, live better …
The craft of building a meaningful life
We already know that we are not truly free to live life in our own exclusive way. There are limits, there are obligations and codes to respect. However, beyond those inescapable principles that mark our coexistence as social beings, we must open our eyes wide to get rid of those knots that do not work, that do not help, that take away movement and personal freedom.
Many of these knots are gestated as we already know by our culture, our families, our social relationships, even the weight of a markedly patriarchal society in many aspects that is still rusty. We must therefore intuit them and leave those uncomfortable ties that encircle our personal growth.
On the other hand, and to find the meaning that will serve us to lead a fuller existence, it is also essential that we understand an aspect. We know that today that approach that encourages us to be more present, to appreciate the here and now, has a lot of weight. However, we also need to go a step further to ask ourselves the following: what do I want for tomorrow? How do I want to see myself in the near future?
The answer we give ourselves will give us a meaning for our present, it will clear paths, it will give us hope and motivation. Only then will we be better weavers of stories and builders of a dream according to our vital goals.
Images courtesy of Tiziana Rinaldi
