Fleur Blur

What does your life mean to you? What do you love? How do you decide how to live each day? We go unaware of the answers to these questions most of the time. We float through life, catering to our anxieties and insecurities and never knowing in a deep way what our purpose is. We don’t acknowledge our mortality because we’re afraid of it, and in turn we’re never acutely aware of how important the moments we’re alive for really are. It makes it easier for us to surrender those moments to boredom, to television, to monotony and nothingness. It can be so easy to tune out when you’re desensitized to being alive. I’ve had this sinking feeling in my chest since I can remember, that as a species we’ve lost touch. There is no ground underneath us. We have surrendered the most important aspect of our consciousness in an effort to be comfortable—the ability to be aware of the self, which is to necessarily be aware of the finiteness of the self. If we acknowledge that the gift of a sentient mind is temporary, it becomes sacred. Life is not to be spent half-awake. You must fill it with all that you want to feel and experience, and not just in the long term but in each and every day. And because we must make the moments matter, because they DO matter, we must always be on a journey of discovering how we can do that.

What does your life mean to you? What do you love? How do you decide how to live each day?

There is a place deep within each of us that holds those truths. I still don’t know how to see them every day, but sometimes they come to me in random moments like they did today. I was thinking about how there is a wellspring inside of me, how my art, my work, my love, even my despair all come from that wellspring. It has no limits and it never stops giving—it is my life source. I can direct it. Many times I don’t and that energy turns into rumination and worry. But AH, that’s the gift of consciousness—I can move it and shape it and refine it, because I am self-aware. All living things have the same wellspring inside of them, but the energy that comes from it is sometimes directed and controlled only by biology. We are so in control of our inner-energy that we can override our own biology. If we are so advanced that the brain can change itself (i.e., the growth of new neural pathways even late into life) how are we not to choose the way we want to live each day?

It seems like such a small task, figuring out how to fill a day. I’m the kind of person who can plan 80 things to get done between 8am and 8pm in an effort to feel “purposeful.” It’s extremely easy for me to do this, but when I do I usually just feel exhausted and drained at the end of it. I tell myself I’m just trying to be productive, I’m just trying to make my days matter—but even when I accomplish more in a day than most do in a month, I usually still feel unfulfilled at the end of it. And I think I understand why now: I have lost touch with my inner guide, or maybe I still haven’t met her. There is no deep, true, soul-born reason that I do the things that I do in a day. I have glimmers of it, but most of what I do is because a) I have to/am committed to it and b) I think it will make me happier/prettier/more accomplished/healthier/etc. It’s like being on autopilot. I go to school and I learn how to be a psychologist but I am in no way in touch with WHY I want to be a psychologist while I am, say, doing a negative binomial regression or doing bedside therapy. I am just doing those things because I have to, because it’s part of a goal that I’ve committed to. I’m very good at getting done the things I need to get done. But I am not so good at being in touch with the deeper reason I am spending the precious, limited moments of my life doing these things. Anything can be empty if you let it, but anything can also be full and real and purposeful. You can do meaningful medical work and feel empty at the end of the day, and you can get stuck in traffic during a sunset and feel joyfully connected to the moment, like it was meant for you. 

nightwatch by Ⓜⓡ. Ⓔⓓ on Flickr.