Life is weird thing, isn’t it? It throws us into a crazy world, into crazy families and then it leaves it to us and our abilities to live it.
Finding myself in a place today that I wouldn’t have looked for on my own initiative, I have come to realise that its vital to let go of your own expectations and to trust life a little if we don’t want to miss out on its beauty.
Life is an invitation to dance. Life is an invitation to fall. An invitation to break your legs and an invitation to trust the fact that pain will subside. All you can do is to collect the lessons you have learned, put them into your backpack of experience and take them with you.
However, with the backpack getting heavier as we grow older, we should make sure to sit down and take a break every once in a while. We should open the backpack, take out all of the funny pieces that mingle in there, examine their relevance and throw away the heaviest items.
An experience isn’t alway the most competent advisor. Experiences create a corset of anxiety that will restrict us. Fears tell us to avoid objects, people and situations that we believe to be dolorous and they make us put blinkers on. As a direct consequence anxieties create expectations. And expectations constitute an even tighter belt. When we expect and wish for something, we tend to only pick up the pens and the colours that we deem harmless and paint pipe dreams and castles in the air that are built upon fixed ideas and our interpretation of happiness. Happiness, however, isn’t an interpretation. Happiness is a decision - a decision to embrace life for what it is and enjoy the ride - even if it gets bumpy every now and then.
We force life into our ideas, into our dreams, we squeeze it into a small box that only contains every thing we know. But magic happens if we throw unknown variables into the equation. Magic happens where things hang around that we don’t know. Magic happens if we accept the invitation to dance and adapt to the rhythm and the melody of life. If we let go of the frustrations that flare up when life doesn’t follow the script that we have written for ourselves and if we accept and engage in unexpected situations. Only then can we end up in a place that we never even knew existed. A place that might be bigger, better and more colourful than any of the castles that we have built within the walls of our expectations. Only then can we come to like and love things and people that we never even knew we missed.
Doesn’t that turn life into a pretty easy business? If we decide not to listen to our expectations, if we occasionally decide to disregard our thoughts and feelings, we become fairly free creatures that are open and receptive to the unknown and as such for a beauty that can exceed our own idea of what beauty is.
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born” ~ Anaïs Nin
