Out of the Garden and into Happiness

I keep thinking this will be a regular thing and then am shocked that it has been many months between my postings.  My own delusions threaten to overwhelm me...

As many of you know I am transitioning out of one role and into another at my job and I am very excited to see where this new position takes me.  My old position was getting quite stagnant and it was ready to move on.  A friend told me in the midst of a somewhat stressful transition process that "we must never become too complacent to not demand those things that we truly deserve."  His words hit a place deep in my heart and have resonated with me ever since.  Much of what I have written about on this site is about self-confidence, recreation, and constant self-discovery.  Somewhere in the last 6 months or so I forgot to apply these same concepts to my own life and began to feel despondent.  I had hit a glass ceiling called apathy and I had not even realized it.

As we move through life we must enjoy the journey but always remember that it is a movement through life and that what is safe and comfortable is not always what is required of us.  The notion of creative destruction ism is what has driven economies for millennia, perhaps we should explore some of those same concepts in our own lives. Refusing to disregard past mental schemas that are outdated and inaccurate is just as inefficient as it would be to type this on a typewriter and distribute it by hand.  We must be willing to destroy those things in our mind and our lives that are holding us back from our future potential.  Often times these are mental struggles in which we are destroying concepts, ideas, and trains of thought that have become detrimental to our health and happiness.  Occasionally we need to move our physical location, change our friends, cast off indulgent possessions; regardless of what part of our life needs to be destroyed we must acknowledge that the only power these schemas and possessions have over us is the power we give them.

There are two things in life that have an intrinsic static value attached to them: a human life and the passing of time.  All other values in the equations are variable and must be adjusted constantly in order to find the proper balance.  Unfortunately our brains are hardwired against changing value assignments and in situations where it should be simple to walk away from places, ideas, or activities that are ultimately causing us harm it is actually quite hard to destroy our previously assigned value.  These value associations are important to our development as humans and essential to categorizing our life in a meaningful way.  What is most important is that we acknowledge the extent to which how we assign value runs our life on a daily basis. Once we make this recognition we are able to determine whether our previous value assignments make sense in light of our new goals or position in life.  Our mind does much of this naturally for us in terms of material possessions but it becomes a much more difficult process when fellow humans enter into the equation.

As an example of this process think about the last time you moved and recall packing up the boxes, deciding what should go and what could probably just be thrown away.  I imagine the emotions were running quite high for some items. It almost felt as if certain items were calling out to you, begging to be brought along. I imagine some items had very specific memories attached to them and thus established a bridge to a past you that should be cherished and remembered fondly.  As a personal example every 6 months or so I go through my clothes and purge some items that have either gotten too worn out or that I just don't wear anymore.  Every time I come to the same pair of jeans that I have had since I was 17.  They are really more threads than jeans now, they don't fit too well, and I never wear them; every time they get put back into the drawer.  Why? Because I bought them in San Francisco in the midst of a summer that was incredibly transformative for me and they are an embodiment of all that I experienced in those three months.  I have attached such a high value on this completely inanimate object that I pretty much can't bring myself to throw it away.

Now jeans are a rather mundane and somewhat harmless attachment, but what if we became attached to a particular schema (perception of the world) that became outdated and was actually holding us back from correctly perceiving the events that our life in the present.  This attachment becomes dangerous and potentially harmful as it begins to dictate who we are in the future based on events in the past.  Now as I have said before we all carry such schemas and we must in order to not go crazy.  However as our friend Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  Thus, when we carry a set of values or perceptions of the world despite the evidence in front of our face projecting a very different picture we are only moving slowly down the road towards insanity.

Despite the mildly incoherent writing above I would like to finish strongly and decisively.  We must allow ourselves to be continually surprised and awestruck by the world outside of us.  A man who is surprised by nothing has nothing left to live for.  Only when we open our hearts and minds to recognize themselves can we truly walk with a purpose.  I implore you all to never get caught in complacency of the heart or trapped in schemas of the past for it is a dark place and the world melts to an endless grey...I know, the last few months I have felt it... But today the sun is shining brightly and I am reinvigorated to cast off complacency and demand from my heart, mind, and life the happiness I deserve.  The garden is not where we will find the answers to the real questions in life, we would never be content there for very long... No, we must daily walk out of the garden and into the wilderness if we want to experience all that it means to be human.

With Great Love,

Trevor