Letting Go of the External





Alright, so I am finally back to writing a bit. It has been awhile but sometimes, well, life happens and I needed some time to integrate the lessons that it continuously tries to teach me.

One of these lessons is the way I tend to depend on external factors to be ok. I firmly believe this is the case for most people. And when I say external factors, I mean everything! Whether it is a particular love interest, how a particular project is going at the moment, how work is going, how much money I am making, is my curly hair under control today, whether it is sunny outside or not, etc. The list goes on!

I have been trying to avoid having to deal with this truth in my own life. Telling myself that everybody depends on external factors and that it would be way too hard to learn how to be ok without them…like me being ok without chocolate for example? My mind is like: Impossible!
And yet, here I am now confronting this truth head on. I see the way my mood depends on how I judge my life to be going, and how it is heightened by positive events and quickly dampened by what I perceive as negative ones.

I am literally obsessed with the question of where true happiness comes from…and yet I still fall prey to thinking that happiness is somewhere outside of me. I think that is one of the hardest lessons I am learning these past couple of years. It’s like the universe has made sure that my life does not turn out the way I thought it would and now is challenging me to still be happy. Well, life…challenge accepted!

I have been feeling so committed lately to just learning how to be happy without any reason for it. To learn to appreciate whoever seems to be appearing in my life at any given moment, whether they are here to stay or just passing by for a fleeting moment. I want to learn to thank life for their presence, even if I am in tears should they not decide to stay. I want to learn to truly love, without needing to possess or to have any agenda other than simply, truly appreciating a person. I want to learn to be continuously inspired by the people I meet and open to what they have to teach me. I want to learn to be ok, even if I am not feeling ok, and to see beauty even in the darkest moments. I want to learn how not to hang on to anything, so as to allow the flow of life to occur unimpeded by my resistance to it. I am so tired of resisting. And it is so freeing, in so many ways, to stop.

What if I could decide to just be happy right now, in this instant? And to do that for every instant that follows? What if I didn’t need to listen to my mind anymore, telling me how impossible that is, how I should expect certain things, how life is unfair. Blablabla. Sorry mind, you are great for some things but you kind of suck for others.

What if I decide today to let go of the limits of my own definition of self and the idea of how life ‘’should’’ be, radically accepting the beauty of what is in front of me right now, in whatever form it takes. Embracing it with all my heart while being ready to let go of it so as to allow the beauty of the next moment to come.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anything else worth dedicating my life to. And I plan to spend the rest of my life, oh so imperfectly, striving towards this ideal. Life is so short, everything can be gone tomorrow, and I want to make sure I am not wasting my time being anywhere other than right here, right now.

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