ILUSION OF REALITY

Each and every one of us live our lives the best way we know how, according to the perspective we have about our own reality at a specific given moment. Naturally, as we are totally absorbed in our own world, it’s very hard to realize its eminent subjectivity. Like a strikingly real nightmare, so real, that when you wake up you’re still upset. Of course, after waking up, we won’t be trying to solve any of the dangers we were confronted with in the dream, right? While awake, it’s easy to recognize that, in fact, they weren’t real. But what about while you’re sleeping?

In fact without waking up from our own subjectivity, it’s very hard to understand that our experience is permanently originated from a kind of dream, momentarily fabricated by a more or less lasting mental state.

A silly discussion that doesn’t seem so distressing the next day. A nagging concern that later on becomes no more than a forgotten event. A frustrating problem that with a little reflection time, almost gets solved on its own. An overwhelming level of stress at work that is for the most part relieved with a relaxed conversation, despite nothing actually changing, externally.  An expectation we created, a broken dream, a painful betrayal, which, as time goes by, becomes an ordinary part of our journey. A path that is built by walking, so often better the fewer the times we look back. 

If you think about this, it´s so frequently to feel that by meddling with our observation point, we are changing the object! It’s so recurrent to realize after closing that deal, or successfully completing a difficult project, that the sun becomes different and the colors more beautiful, everything’s easier at home, although everything is as it’s always been.

It is so much so, I was saying, that it seems risky to take what’s real as a granted and settled variable of our equation and forget that our story about our story, is only one of the possible stories that can be told. Based on a thought, ours, repeatedly biased and that we only keep almost as a habit.  And because we can’t see any other during the dream. New perspectives are therefore new realities in the same world.

I frequently ask my clients to reflect upon a concept I call “second life”... Imagine you died some years ago, in an unexpected accident. However, because you behaved very well, in heaven they gave you the opportunity to “reincarnate”, taking over someone’s life, randomly chosen. In that raffle, you got your own life, yet unknown. With all the ingredients. Your whole past. People, home, car, professional situation, everything exactly the same. With the only different thing being the presence of a renewed will of living life to the fullest. The freedom to change everything that can be changed and a pulsating enthusiasm to bleed dry the incredible opportunity to experience a little more life…whichever that life is. Ready to make of your new character, a character filled with happiness. Ready to yet again admire all the beauty and richness of your surroundings, in all its numerous features, which, by force of habit, have faded away and have been almost forgotten…

The question is: “fresh landed” in the planet, prejudice free, and having your assets in mind, in which way would you try to “score points”? What counts as “points” for this new character?

How would you play the game so that you can keep yourself away from situations that apparently restrain you and in order to conquer the freedom to move forward towards more inspiring ambitions? How would you take benefit from the privilege of having won a few more years in this planet, bearing in mind the context of this new person you are? What would you start by doing, beginning today, to breathe in the intensity and gratitude of existing once more?

Sometimes we need to take the past as past and start again, fresh, as someone that’s just arrived… after all there’s still so much to live. So much to enjoy. So much to reinvent. Let’s wake up!...