The problem of getting our internal reality to see and appropriately deal with external reality is a constant challenge. The I we know ourselves to be easily gets blurred by life’s challenges and particularly when some of those challenges wind up in failure.
We are the composite sum of our past identities. A child, a teen, a young adult and so on. Though we transition slowly from one to the next absorbing the totality of ourselves as we progress, it is still possible to occasionally go back and call up old forgotten ways of looking at things. Something like stepping out of ourselves for a moment and asking how we would have dealt with the problems of our present reality from the perspective of the way we saw things 10, 20, 30-years ago.
Sometimes the tone of our existence can get bogged down in negative feelings that inhibit us from confronting life’s challenges with a positive can-do attitude. Our goals can become blurred as our motivation to tackle challenges seems to dry up.
Living on autopilot with no clear sense of direction is something we all tend to fall victims of to one degree or another. And before we know it, the mirror starts to say that our best years are behind us even though that is never really true. New and unique opportunities to advance are always out there if we can just open our eyes to the possibilities.
Each day we wake up and make many decisions that determine the direction of our lives. Though there is definitely a physical component to our mood or attitude, we still have a large ability to have an effect on how external reality looks to us.
All of this is nothing more or less than the way we chose to look at things. It is the preverbal glass half full or half empty way of looking out through life’s looking glass. And like all the other elements that coalless between our ears to give us a picture of reality, sometimes the fact that we are in the driver’s seat and at the controls temporarily eludes us as we sink into feeling like helpless victims who are just along for the ride. Waiting to win the lottery or for life to turn lucky is a bad idea that leads nowhere. Taking control of your own destiny is a much better way to take advantage of the opportunities life offers.
Maintaining a realistic connection to reality is the best and most direct way to find what we are looking for from within that reality. Investing time and energy in maintaining false beliefs that have no connection to reality serves no purpose other than to keep us out of sync with reality. That’s the single unyielding reality that never included any supernatural beings looking at us to determine which eternity we would check into after we died.
The best chance any of us has at self-fulfillment is to keep it real. No one ever finds a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow no matter how much they try after learning to believe in fairytales. Love, faith, allegiance, and worship have never held the power to remake reality into something it isn’t. And leading a pretend existence in preparation for what comes after inevitably leads to the same dead-end road we all eventually arrive at.
If reality tells us nothing, it says in a clear and resounding voice that life is what happens between beginnings and ends. There is nothing more no matter how much we might want to rewrite the ending of our story. It is what it is and was what it was long before anyone ever dreamed of living forever.
