As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be, you can't see how it is" ~Ram Dass~
Sometimes you meet people who seem to live in a fantasy world. They have pasted a smile on their face and their mouth drips honey, but, underneath that, one has to wonder, what is there. We are never happy happy all the time. There has to be some reality in there somewhere. To not acknowledge and be authentic about normal expressions of feelings, is not healthy. Living in a fantasy world means you will always be let down. It is not, as w were taught, ‘happily ever after’. Life is life and reality is reality.
So many around me speak of “If only…” as if there ever was a perfect life to be lived. We live a life fraught with decisions to be made and then living with the results. It is way too easy to slip into depression over one’s life. For some reason, many are wired to feel disappointed or ‘not enough’. Somehow, we need to find the balance between fictional wants and needs and expectations, and reality. Somehow, we need to do that old ‘accept what you cannot change and change what you can” adage. I think a goal is to try to find what comforts, what we can accept, and what we cannot and are willing to do the work to change. There really are many F words to life, for sure.
Somehow, we need to find the faith in ourselves and in the life we lead within the greater complex of being human beings and the sense of being flawed in some way. We are not flawed. We are simply trying to make the best of it all. And not the best of what was, but the best of what IS! It is futile to think you can change the story of your past. Yes, we have all, every one of us, made mistakes and tried to make amends for, so many things. We forget how to let go of things that simply were/are. After a few losses in life, perhaps we get it. We cannot control ourselves, never mind control others to fit what we think ought to be.
We can spend time learning about accepting what our decision might have had us forfeit in life. Accepting that we did indeed fix our future by making flawed choices, is imperative. Every single human being has regrets. Regrets come from fantasizing that things, for us, were meant to be more perfect than they were.
We all fear something. We all have had to fiercely meet our fears at some point. Loss is a huge one that we fear. We have this unrealized sense that not having something might be the literal ‘end of the world’ to us. And, it is the end of the way our world was, but we don’t often die of loss. We seem to muddle and struggle through until we forget the original pain we thought we could not live through. (Think childbirth) We all have faced many fears or fantasized ourselves through it. We live to find fate have us face it all again.
Every one of us has gotten things wrong, many times… or what felt wrong according to judgments and criticisms. In many ways, some of our wildness will show through at times. And we will disappoint ourselves and others. It is a given. We need to forgive and others, if they count at all, should forgive us our humanity and our frailty at doing and making choices that make life seem as flawed as we are. Of course, we are flawed. Everyone is. We are stumbling through life, bouncing off walls, and feeling like disappointment should be forever. It is not. It al means an opportunity to change things up so we do not do the exact same thing over and over again that leads to feelings of disappointment.
We are all vulnerable to life. We hate it. We are it. All we can do is NOT feign innocence or feign strength when we truly do not have it. We are forging through unknown territory every minute of every day. We are, so many times, tilting at windmills. It is those ‘secrets’ we have that keep us vulnerable. We can have some that lead us to feel shame. We have some that are best left hidden because it makes us more vulnerable. We have some to share and some that are not shareable. Those things are not meant to stall us forever. They are meant to keel us humble; I think. Sometimes our fantasies are our secrets. Some live in that rather than face reality. Sometimes those secrets are what broke our hearts. Sometimes those secrets are about love or lack thereof. We were all brought up with fairy tales. Sometimes we have loved and not been loved back and we tend to be fatalistic and think that, for some reason, we did not deserve that love instead of accepting that it simply was not for us and move on. Sometimes our secrets are al about us seeing faults in things we do, have, think, say, ect., and we forget that ‘it is what it I’ an there is some cosmic reason why we cannot have it or have had it. Accepting that is huge for some of us.
Loss is an area where we tend to move into fight or flee. Life is all about loss. We live and we die. Loss is the main theme of being human. Yes, loss makes us stronger… or, for some, weaker. Loss is pain. We fer pain of any kind. Pain is not something we can completely control. We resist it, but, in the end losses are what make us resilient, brave, strong, kind, compassionate, or should do so. No matter how much I resist loss, I can never go back to Maine and have my life, there, back. Grass will never be the same kind of green on this side of that loss. Some losses are forever and we either heal from great loss or we cave in and become the frightened mouse in the focal point of the eagle eye that is focused on us. Some times it is not for better, but is for worse and we spend the rest of our days wishing, hoping, trying to recreate or rest in the rubble of our lives for the rest of eternity. Sometimes we have to refrain from idolizing what was, because, as humans, we are wont to dis-remember.
We have no idea what is coming next. Life is fraught with new adventures, new losses, new gray areas of what to do or what not to do. We all are role models at every moment of our lives and we have no idea who might be thinking we are models of how to do things, until we fail to do what someone else thinks we are so perfect at. We will fall off our pedestals for those who might think we got it all together. Of course, we do not have it all together. Of course, we will compare our self to others and others will compare themselves to us. We are always someone else’s ‘could’ and there will always be someone else who is our ‘should’. Wee weigh our ‘better than’ and our ‘less than’ as if that were the end all. We are not meant to live someone else’s life. Trying to do so will defeat the purpose of us being who and where and what we are and our unique journey we are on down here on hard earth.
So, which is it? Fantasy or reality? We can feign perfection and then leap off the cliff one day and show our reality. And there are always cliffs. We can jump and splat or we can fly. We can either focus on the flaw that we do not have wings, or we can enjoy the free fall and make some decisions from where we are. Yes, we are going to splat at the end, but that is that reality that we live to die.
Right now, this very moment, we are exactly who we are. Sitting in front of our screen is as pure and honest a moment as will have… for a few more moments. We simply ARE and fate or flaw is nothing in this moment. We are not perfect at even this. Our mind is working a mile a minute. But, what we are at this moment is our reality. Each moment we can reorient where we are going in life. Every moment, we have a choice to FEEL enough or not enough. No one else cares what we feel, really. It is what we do with those feelings that is fatalistic or faithful to being perfectly imperfect and in a state of being ‘a work in progress’. We can calmly walk forward or we can dig a foxhole and stay under cover and dream reality rather than live it raw and real.
Be real, sisterfriends, be real. I need your reality to keep me grounded rather than fleeing into fantasy-living and living someone else’s life rather than my own.
©Carol Desjarlais 13.12.20
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