Much of my work lately is centered around choices. How difficult yet liberating it is to make them; how scary yet thrilling it is to leave something behind.
We often miss the real point when we feel our life will shrink when defining things. Life usually expands when it confronts reality. It shrinks inside our heads, where we feed it fantasies we do nothing to fulfill. We stay in a limbo that has the comfort of everything-ness, and the mold of food left out too long. Inside our heads A can coexist with B even if A is ‘staying’ and B is ‘leaving’. And this coexistence is not a peaceful, integrated one. It’s a world where everything can happen only because nothing happens.
Let’s take a step back though. This makes us — yes, “us”, because we all are, at times, people whose only choice is to live inside their heads — seem childish and unreasonable. Why would we ever decide to live surrounded by a blob of things that contradict each other, when choosing is so sensible and mature?
The easy answer is that we aren’t sensible or mature. At least not exclusively. Some of our atoms might be virtuous and reflective, but many other are filled with less resume-friendly tendencies. We will postpone making a choice if it costs us too much effort now, even if it’ll cost us a lot more effort later. We might be a smart species, but we’re not that smart.
The longer answer is that approximately half of our life is lived emotionally, led by beliefs that are not founded on facts, but on needs. This doesn’t make them less real, but it makes us fools when we treat them as facts. We need to believe we can experience the warmth of someone else’s commitment without ever giving ours completely, and our mind is very skilled at making that indisputable. Our reality is exactly this: the one where we desire to give less than what we receive. Because we are defensive, scared, weary, greedy. This is real for us, but it’s not the reality. The reality is that the perfectly well-oiled machine of relationships will ensure that balance will be found eventually, and the commitment we haven’t given will not be returned anymore. It’s not karma, it’s a world of meaningful actions and related consequences. The world of adults, where things exist and people act.
In our world of fantasy, when for all kinds of reasons we withdraw from the world of adults, things half-exist and half-don’t, and we can be soothed by half-truths. We don’t choose because we don’t know why we are choosing. We leave unsaid and undone all those things that before even scaring us, confuse us. Endless questions about what the world will look like after our choice, and the small consolation that we can leave the world as it is, while we dream of possibilities that just because we dream of them, seem real. We need to leave things unchanged, just for a little longer, because we don’t know who we are and what we want, and we live in the illusion that just because we are pausing, the world also is.
If we make choices in this state of mind, even choosing won’t save us from the illusion of everything-ness, from the fantasy of omnipotence. We will walk the A-path while still thinking about B, how amazing it would have been if we made that other choice instead of this one. We miss the point, that there is no real better choice. It’s how we choose, that matters.
Empatherapy 