I hope the hard lessons I’ve learned will save you some trouble.
We are like lotus flowers, which bloom in ponds thanks to having their roots anchored in the mud.
That mud is our mistakes and failures.
And it is thanks to them that we break through to the light of midday and blossom into life.
Lotus seeds can last for years and years without blooming and still be fertile. It is the same for us humans.
It has taken me forty years to get through all that mud (and I still have some left), and today, I want to share with you some of the lessons I have learned so that it will be easier for you.
1. Desire is a powerful tool but a bad master
We must be careful because when desire takes hold of us, it transforms us into slaves of its will.
Desire and dreaming are sides of the same coin. So are pleasure and fear. That is why you have to be careful: reality is like an extension of the dream legislated by your subconscious.
That is why it makes sense to heal the ego, to desire only what is necessary and not end up on the ugly side of the coin and turn your dreams into nightmares thanks to that ego that is nothing more than a caricatured projection of our essence, but not our essence itself.
2. It is we who feed our fears
We want to have our minds at peace, but we do not achieve it because what we really want is for our minds to leave us in peace.
Reality is just as rigid or plastic as our minds. We limit ourselves to limit existence to our cosmovision of the world.
From these limits, our darkest nightmares are born when we see the imaginary world we have created threatened.
And this ends up condemning us to a search for peace in the external, without realizing that what we need is for our mind to calm down. And for this, we do not have to feed it with more stimuli, but put it on a diet and only introduce kind and beneficial thoughts in it.
3. Wisdom is in everything
You can understand the world from any point you choose to look at and begin to go deeper.
You can know the world from the history of agriculture. You can see the world by the history of its wars. You can see the world through its literature. You can know the world through the evolution of fashion. You can see the world through its architecture. Etc.
The important thing is that you dig deep.
You could choose to be a potato farmer and get to know the world by digging deep into your trade. You could extrapolate what you learn from planting, harvesting, droughts, and rains to the rest of your life.
That is why there are sayings: Wisdom is everywhere; it resides in the simple, and it is just waiting for you to invest the necessary time to calm down, observe your surroundings, and be surprised by its teachings.
4. Do not deny yourself the now for not being able to do it like yesterday
Don’t get frustrated for not being ten years younger; take life with humor. Humor is an aspirin for the pain that reality sometimes causes us.
It makes no sense to be bitter about yesterday because the price is to sacrifice the now.
If you want to play sports, do it. If you want to go to college, go. If you want to travel, travel. But don’t lament that you can’t do it as you did in your twenties. Do it the way you would do it now. Permit yourself to be yourself in your present.
I don’t write as I did in my twenties, I don’t have the same innocence, and I cannot write the poetry I wrote in my youth, but I allow myself to write the poetry I get to write in my forties, even if it is bitter.
5. Everyone sees in others what he wants
Loneliness is felt when one does not know how to be in the company.
And on top of that, it sours our character, and we criticize everything. Then we find it hard to live with others, and we project our vision of the world onto them.
So, if you want some good advice: stop being a curmudgeon. You’re not perfect, and the people around you aren’t.
Hate the sin if you want, but not the sinner. He’s a person just like you. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in these forty years, we ALL need second and third chances.
A virtual hug
AG