What
If
“The
feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that
are absurd—The longing for impossible things, precisely because
they are impossible; the nostalgia for what never was; the desire for
what could have been; regret over not being someone else;
dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of
the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal
sunset of what we are.”
Fernando
Pessoa
All of us live from
time-to-time in what I call, “The Land of What-If.” It's just
down the road from “The Land of If-Only.” What if I had been born
with a silver spoon, what if I were younger, stronger, handsomer,
what if my parents had loved me unconditionally, what if I had gone
to the right schools, married the right person....sigh, if only.
Taking stock of a lifetime, we can make long lists of what we did and
didn't have, how we were treated and mistreated, who loved us and who
should have loved us, but didn't. If only we had done things
differently, had tried harder, had known then what we know now, if
only...you get the point, right? All this yearning for what never
was, and what isn't now, drains us of energy and colors our world
dreary.
If we stop all this
“what-ifing” and “if onlying,” we can begin to see what is
and what could be. Yes, you say, but stopping is the hard part. And
that can be true. Sometimes it's hard to give up feeling sorry for
ourselves because we've built a life around it—it has become who we
are, or seemingly so. I'm the first to admit to falling into this
trap from time to time. “Oh, if only...” I am training myself to
hear a warning bell, one of those obnoxious buzzers, when this
thought arises inside my head. Carl Jung said, “You cannot
change anything unless you accept it...We are not what happened to
us, we are what we choose to become.” Some of us grew up in
less than ideal conditions. We may have had flawed parents—presumably
they were human beings, so that qualifies them as flawed. We likely
have made some mistakes in our lives—being human as well. We've
missed opportunities, taken wrong turns, made stupid choices and ended up in blind
alleys—at least, I have. As grown-up people, however, we are now
the ones who keep the blood flowing from our childhood wounds. And we
are the ones who must staunch the flow.
We do that by forgiving
and accepting and moving on. We have to let everyone off the hook,
ourselves included, our parents included, all our former lovers and
spouses and various and sundry enemies. Call this the year of the
Jubilee—and let 'em go. The simple reason for this is to free
ourselves from the burden of holding everyone to account for their
sins and failures. Yearning for what never was creates toxic emotions
in us that are poisonous to our hearts and souls. Once free, we can
look around and see all the possibilities waiting in to be
discovered—right here, right now, in “The Land of What-Is.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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