From the time we were infants, we were told that there is a “right” way to live your life. Therefore, your job is to find that right way. Everyone has an opinion about how you should live. Some think you should pursue spiritual growth, personal development, and perfect yourself. Some think you should get involved with acts of kindness. Some think you should save the world, or have the right politics, or adopt the right belief. We have been sold a bill of goods.
Most everyone has, somewhere in the back of his or her mind, an image of the correct way to live. Most people are not aware of how much they have taken on the concept of how they should live their lives, so the concept remains unnoticed even when it is a major influence in how they think of goals, values, symbols of success and failure, where they should be at certain ages, the types of relationships, family, career, home, or organizations to which they should belong.
Good chance you have an unknown image in the recesses of your mind. This image will plague you until it is confronted. Sometimes the image comes from role models you admired in your youth. For some, it’s James Bond; for some, it’s their favorite rock star. Maybe it’s an astronaut like Neil Armstrong. Maybe it’s Mother Teresa or Amelia Earhart. Maybe it is a combination of several role models, all mixed up, all vying for your attention and acquiescence. One thing that is important to know is that you will never be able to live up to that concept.
Of course, many like to put themselves in a position of authority about how you should live. For some, it’s a business opportunity sold with theories and promises of happiness, success, and rewards. For others, it is a calling in that they feel compelled to spread their hypothesis of how life should be lived. For others, it is confirmation of their own belief systems, because they feel that the more people who agree with them, the more validity their beliefs have. For others, it’s a way to pass the day, as they think about their friends’ and families’ lives, and how they would change the way those people would live. As they say about certain parts of the human anatomy, everyone has got an opinion about the right way to live.
Who can say to what you should aspire, or what you should hold dear, or who you should love, or what you should think. Of course, this can be a scary thought. Freedom is a hard issue for most people. One thing that makes it hard is a common confusion which can be captured in this one common reaction to the idea that often comes up when freedom is discussed, “No one is free to throw their garbage on my lawn.”
Throwing your garbage on someone else’s lawn is not a question of freedom. It is a question of sovereignty. It is about ownership and jurisdiction. But, when pursing that line of attack, the deeper issue of your freedom to live your life anyway you see fit gets lost.
The basic misconception that generates the dogmatic pronouncements about how you should live comes from society’s notion about people. The underlying assumption is that people can’t be trusted, and, therefore, left to their own devices, they will be destructive. So, therefore, people need to be controlled. If you thought this, you would feel that it is critical to tell others how to live.
Yet, when people are truly free to make their own choices, they choose health over sickness, love and relationships over hate and strife, productive and meaningful work over meaningless and fruitless endeavors, and to join together to support each other for the common good rather than isolate themselves in a survival of the most selfish game-theory and paranoid vision of a hostile world.
What does it take to enjoy such freedom? It takes freeing the mind from the chains of all concepts. Concepts are not reality. That’s why they are concepts. You don’t need a concept to know what you are tasting, or smelling, or touching, or hearing. Your senses are designed to perceive reality so that you can make decisions about what you will do in the circumstances. Yet, so much of our world is in love with concepts. And why not? You never have to prove a concept in reality. And if a concept turns out to reflect reality, it is no longer a concept, but a known fact. Freedom, like life itself, happens in reality, not in your mind. And freedom of thought is a building block for organizing your life based on your highest aspirations and deepest values.
The next thing it takes to enjoy such freedom is mastery of the creative process. If you can’t create what you truly want, you can wish all you want, but your chances are slim. Not all things that people want are possible. But we have been taught from our earliest moments on this planet that you can’t have what you want. At least, not what you REALLY want. And, of course, all the experts in how we should live have their lists of what we should want. But, if you are free of concepts, if you no longer have to uphold the image that is in the back of your mind about how you should be, you can re investigate what you might really want. But this is more than discovery. It is an evolutionary process. And here is where the creative process becomes so essential. You can learn how to think in terms of what you truly want by creating the small things you want first. A meal, a look for a room, a dinner party, a blog you write, a small flower bed, and on and on it can go. You become decisive by making decisions. You build your creative muscle by creating. Soon you will find that, while many things you may want are not possible, many more are. Over time and experience, your vision of your own life becomes more your own. And while many people might have an opinion, no one has a vote.
There is no right way to live your life. But there is YOUR way. And that’s all that counts.
https://www.wisepond.com/blogs/2012/12/17/theres-no-right-way-live-your-life
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