A snowdrop. I picked it up from the street and smelled it. What one person dropped became a source of joy. I looked at its petals…3 white proofs of nature’s perfection. All leading to a center. I thought of life: how do we get to our center?
I had a heart to heart conversation with one of my loyal clients about the meaning of life. She thought that she had it all sorted out: graduating from a military highschool and pursuing the Academy only to have landed in a top paid job, with enough free time and stability for the rest of her life. I’ve known her since she was in highschool, I know her now. The moment she walked on the door I have felt her energy being different. A feeling of melancholy mixed with pain, despair and confusion. How do you cope with the fact that the school hasn’t prepared you for life? I looked at her, she looked at me, we both smiled and I have said: honey, I haven’t figured my shit out either. Welcome to the club! Something in her resonated with me because after 8 years of working in a beauty salon I no longer find my place and purpose anymore in this activity. And this is how we sat down and talked through it.
We have all been programmed to believe certain things since we were little. Safety was and still is something that many people reach out for. Once they find it, they desperately cling to it thinking that it will make them happy. Money and reaching a certain status is not enough. I wonder why schools prepare you for anything BUT life. How about finding your purpose? How about that as a field of study? In trying to find their center, people get unbalanced because the lines of code do not match with real life experiences which shake you to the core. We always pursue the next dangling carrot thinking that it will taste sweeter than the one we had before. By the end of our lives we look in the mirror wishing we would have been purple instead of orange. The color of regret is not pretty and many shall hide the mirror or smash it into pieces only to hide from the fact that they have lived a life which wasn’t theirs.
We talked. And we haven’t found a solution. Sometimes people feel like talking not because they want a solution from you, but because they feel that you can understand and share their struggle. And oh boy did I feel this girl’s soul. Almost in tears with regret….she wondered about a thing that I am also terrified to wonder about as well: what will I do with my life? You see, once you look at this world beyond a job, material possessions and status, something in the biology of your brain changes. You can’t go back and think today like you were thinking tomorrow. You can’t “un-smarten” yourself if that is even a word. You have pierced through our society’s superficial ways and there is no turning back. Look at all of the people, sitting in cubicles, spending years from their lives doing what they do not like for a safety which is an illusion, picking a safer road towards an imminent death without ever making the courage to live outside their box. Depressing? For sure. What is the purpose of life? I looked at the snowdrop and thought about its center. We have a soul. The rest is just an accessory we needed to have on this Planet. The thing is that every activity and job can feel good if you find a meaning in it. If it contributes to your soul’s journey. For some, that might be enough for a lifetime. For others, an awakening shakes them and makes them realize that there is more….and everything that they have struggled to build means nothing but a lesson for their soul.
So what do you want?What do you really like? Her answer came immediately and it wasn’t about wanting a certain job, but about feeling for a certain thing. She asked me the same thing. Shall I dare to tell the answer? I was able to say just these: I feel I was born to be an artist, a tattoo artist. And I feel I must be somehow in nature. More. And I feel I want to be free and taste life the way I want to instead of sitting between walls thinking that a fancy career is what my soul wants. I want time for love, family, experiences. My dilemma: how do I get there from where I am now? Am I ready to let go?....Pause….We both smiled because we realized that life is a journey. Sometimes the biggest act of courage is to admit in front of somebody else that you haven’t figured out the mysteries of life completely and that is fine.
Schools waste precious years of a child’s life instilling old principles in their brain like those principles would be of any good decades from now. I see them as a part of a system which no longer serves the individual. For far too long. So many people can get trapped in this race for survival which many call a life. When a person has to struggle to pay the bills and a mortgage they no longer have the time or energy to think about themselves as a spiritual being. They become blind to their soul’s needs and keep on running on the spinning wheel of the society. The more I look around me, the more I see that , for the moment, humanity hasn’t designed a society where the soul is a priority. But for sure we have build so many institutions which deal with depression and anger, locking people away when they can’t deal with a life in this flawed system which we have created. No wonder that so many people went mental after the pandemic. For many it was a revelation to sit so much with themselves and think of something else than survival. And the irony is that you would think that many used this time to have found themselves more spiritually. No. Instead, the pandemic only accentuated their belief that we are in a survival mode society. The safest job will save you. The big bank account will buy your happiness. The business will make you feel accomplished. All of these are mental constructs which will crumble in front of the true reality of life: we came here with nothing and we shall depart with nothing because our journey is about the things we have inside. Pause. So I have been fighting for 8 years to acquire goods and possessions only to have realized that what I really needed was a life lesson? Maybe. And maybe not all people realize this, which makes the entire existential quest quite lonely. It is definitely odd to realize that the whole system is flawed and that you want out of the “code”.
Mental reprogramming is hard. I have put her a question as a way of trying to help her gain clarity. We often give the best advice when we also have the same dilemma as the person sitting in front of us. The question was (and feel free to ask this yourself if something inside of you screams): If you choose to sit where you are, are you willing to pay the price? Are you ready to live with the regret of not listening to your soul? Can you live with it? Can you and will you PAY THE PRICE? The price is not about money. It’s about the spiritual loss of a part within you which is divinely designed to dream. It is about allowing yourself to experience life at its truest. LOVE. FREEDOM. EXPERIENCES. DREAMS. This is the price. It might look cheap now, but decades later you can see on the old bitter faces that it was more expensive to go on the safest road than to risk the journey. It is never too late though, because we all have a chance to rewire our brain as long as we are alive. Tic tac. Time surely flies. Are you willing to pay the price?
