Have you seen the Alan Rickman film A Little Chaos? It’s about a peasant woman learning that she is freer than her King. Things can be imperfect. The sun can strike her skin, she can choose her own friends, she can relax. She can even fall in love.
Imagine being a King of yore. You couldn’t marry who you wanted to, you needed to marry for power. You can’t even wear what you like. You’re forced to always dress up in stockings, wear tons of ruffles and heavy buttons even when it’s hot. And who wants to wear scratchy wigs made of wire and hair from dead people and animals?
Tension and fear are the price for fashion in the King’s courts and so it is today. That white powder on the noble faces was lead-based, and it often killed them at far too young an age –all for appearances and a desire to somehow separate themselves from the peasants who worked in the sun.
If we look around us we can see today’s examples of the same dangerous desire to be special.
There’s the girl that gets third degree burns by leaving her tooth-whitening chemicals on for too long; the YouTube mountain biker that breaks their neck trying to get that great piece of footage; or during the running of the bulls in Spain, there was even a runner that favoured getting good footage of himself being gored over prioritizing his escape.
Seen another way, there are parents that end up with suicidal kids by pushing for strictly straight A’s. There are workers who destroy their families trying to get promotions that take them even further from their families. There are people who bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the Jones’s.
These are all examples of us wanting. They all operate on the premise that we do not yet have enough value and must earn it in some way. It’s true that we can expand our value, but we should not live feeling as though our lives are a burden to the universe. Everyone is born worthwhile. Our value comes through the living of our lives.
If we’re motivated to stand out, then we can trust that. But we should not chastise ourselves for not wanting ‘bigger’ or ‘better’ lives for that is, in other words, a way of saying that we are content, satisfied and without want. According to many spiritual leaders, that’s the ultimate definition of ‘rich.’
Being the top dog has a price. No one should feel strange about being in the middle of the pack. It may not make us a household name, but it can offer us the wisest path to less ego, and more accessible fun. And the fact that it is the average is a demonstration that most people agree with our general choice.
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
You’ll find cases who are big stars, or some will be your friends, family or maybe a mentor or lover. They don’t feel like failures to you because they don’t feel that way themselves. Even someone with a small life filled with disasters can really like how it all unfolded, because they know that even most awesome-looking lives are filled with reactions to failure. What makes a life awesome isn’t based in our results, it’s found in the quality our interactions in pursuing them.
Most of the moves we see people make in life are because of the punishment life delivers. Part of this life-game is down at the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid and we all need to eat, so some aspect of life is invested in providing for ourselves and/or others, and our comparative minds we tend to evaluate a large part of ourselves on the basis of how much ‘food’ we’re able to provide. Likewise, we judge others on much the same basis.
What counts is: what did that person do in the face of rejection? Curl up and die? No, they move forward on whatever path is best, whether it appears to lead up or down? Because it’s not like we can tell where a path is going by how it looks at the start. No one begins thinking their wedding will lead to a legal nightmare, just like they won’t assume divorce is the greatest thing that will ever happen to their love life, and yet both things often happen just that way.
You’re a parent and obviously you want to do a great job of raising your kid. Or maybe you know a parent who’s trying to do that. Either way, people have no idea what the future will look like so it’s essentially impossible to raise a kid for success. About all anyone can do is raise their children to be flexible enough that they can thrive in any future.
Styles. Before, when two parents met for lunch, one parent could see the other parent’s kids were alive and they’d talk as two adults about things unrelated to their kids. Today people meet and fretfully discuss the latest article they read that either promises the path to certain success or that explains what is certain to lead to disaster. It’s all very binary, as though parenting is either good or bad when really it’s neither.