Look at your eyes
Who am I, what do I want, where am I going? How many times have we heard these questions, on TV or on the internet, and how many times have we perhaps asked them to ourselves. There is no person in the world who has not passed through these caudine forks of existence, a baptism of awareness to which one tries to give a motivation or, if nothing else, a goal. These are very complicated questions to answer. Although, in fact, Instagram is full of life coaches, the truth is that there are no manuals that teach us “to live”; each of us goes off the cuff, lives life as it comes and as it feels and, as many say, in the end the best you can aspire to, especially in personal relationships, is to try to make as few mistakes as possible. But precisely because there are no manuals that explain how to live in the same way, there is no wrong way to answer these questions. Or rather: there would be a wrong way, and that is to make others respond in our place.
From here all possible disasters arise
When we let others decide “who are we?”, We will lose the compass of our life. We will try to fill it with aesthetic, economic, social certainties, whatever you like; But then comes the day when, looking in the mirror, we will see the face of a stranger reflected, being able to recognize ourselves only through some wrinkle that, in the meantime, life has left on our face, without any possibility of being able to rewind the tape and live it again but in a different way. When we let others answer the question “what do I want from life?” we are condemning ourselves to apathy. The mechanism is as follows: we start by letting others choose the goals of our life, we begin to pursue them with sweat and effort, as if they were our own and, the day we reach them, what I call the “moment of disappointment” is triggered, when we discover that having reached them gives us no joy, no pleasure. The doubt arises of being depressed, precisely because one cannot get pleasure even from achieving the most unexpected goals. But it’s not depression, or not always. We simply achieved goals that weren’t ours. We didn’t really want them, we let others convince us that it was what we wanted, but sooner or later the knots come to a head, and with them also the disappointments. When we let others answer the question “where am I going?”, We are automatically handing over to others the only thing that truly belongs to us, the only great promise that life is truly capable of giving “the future”. Let me explain: the past, for some it can be beautiful, if we are lucky enough to come from a happy family, for others, vice versa, it can be shit. In both cases it no longer belongs to us and in fact we cannot change it. The present is too fast, and slips away, not giving us the time to understand, to organize. The only great promise is the future.
The future
The future is a beautiful time. Think about it: even those who have had the worst of existences up to now have the right to imagine a bright future and to pursue it. Maybe then he won’t succeed but he doesn’t lack the chance, and that’s a great thing. However, when we let others answer the third and final question “where am I going?”, We are therefore giving them the most precious thing we have for us, our future, the ability to write not in the sand or I know a letter for Santa Christmas, but in real life, what really happens, our dreams, our projects, our most intimate inspirations. And this is a shame… Now the question is: why do we let others choose? Well, there can be different reasons from person to person. However, usually the base layer that implies these situations is insecurity. We are insecure and let others choose. An insecurity that can be innate, character, or due to formative bugs of our childhood that have not made us structured enough to be able to answer these questions with extreme freedom.
It is therefore not a fault, for heaven’s sake. But that doesn’t have to be an alibi.
In fact, each of us has the right strength and wisdom to be able to answer these three basic questions alone. But he can do it as long as he listens to his heart. I say this at the cost of sounding dull, but it is so, and if you don’t like the word heart you can replace it with soul, if, me, internal, consciousness. What you want. The result does not change.
Silence everything around you for a moment. From loved ones to friends, social networks. Everything, even the psychologists. Silence everything and focus on the answer that comes from within. Do not be afraid to accept and follow it, even when it seems to you to propose unreasonable things. The one that comes from within an answer that has a thin voice, and for this reason you often do not hear it, dominated as it is by the many who scream trying to explain to us how to live. But if you make the effort to maintain this silence, even if you are the most insecure in the world, you too will perceive a message that comes from within and that tells yourself who you really are, what you want, and where you want to go in life.
Follow your heart
An old book by Susanna Tamaro said “go where your heart takes you”. For years it seemed like a catchphrase put there to sell more books. Today, however, I re-evaluated it. And do you know why? Because I see too many lives around me withering because they don’t have the courage to answer independently to the three questions in this post, because they don’t follow their heart, their instincts. And they live badly, they live very badly, the accounts, for them, never add up. I would like to say to them, take into account the hypothesis of making a mistake in life, but making a mistake on its own. There is also growth in errors. There is a very beautiful phrase from a book by the late Giorgio Faletti that says: “Maybe the mistake was all there. It was the mistake that all men have always made. Try to show yourself strong and contemptuous and winners when perhaps it is enough to have the courage to bow your head and say: I’m afraid. “
And perhaps the discourse, which I have tried to embody so far, it all boils down to the theme of fear. Maybe we let others answer for us because we are afraid. So why not try to accept this fear as a life partner, a companion who may be there today and will no longer be there tomorrow, who knows. We accept the wrong choices, or rather, “our” wrong choices, not those that others have made for us: as soon as we do, we will realize that they are nothing more than one more step that we have climbed towards personal satisfaction. It was not a waste of time, if we did it, and not others for us. We try not to be afraid to create silence around us. It is not a silence that is a prelude to scary things, but it is simply a silence necessary to listen to ourselves, to hear the only “” true truth, that is, the one that each of us has within us since we were born. Let’s rely on our instincts with the same lightness we had as children, when, free from the thousand superstructures of adulthood, we had no difficulty in being free. It came naturally to us. We hugged without hesitation, laughed and cried without carrying the bill of smiles and tears, without fear of being judged by others for this: we ran without the fear of finding ourselves sweaty. Small but fucking free.
Like children
And when we have succeeded in this, when we have made silence around us, when we have taken courage and unconsciousness, that of the aforementioned child, at that moment let’s stop being afraid of making mistakes, because, believe me, the only alternative to trying with your own ideas, in life, it is 100% wrong.
“The downfall is not in the mistake you make, but in the excuse with which you try to hide it.” (M. Gramellini)
