In recent months I’ve come to realize something about our society. It’s something that I was so busy doing just like everyone else and that I was subversively taught to do that I didn’t even realize I was doing until recently. I’ve been hiding the truth from myself. I’ve done this is so many different ways and on so many different levels that I became lost in these illusions of what it was to be human and to experience myself in real life.
What I slowly came to realize is that society presented me with a variety of generic ways that life is supposed to be lived. Like many furniture stores and many other places that exist in our society ewe get a prepackaged ready-made life that is supposed to fit us. A set of implied standards that I was told to live up to and that if I fell into that would make me happy. The trouble and the issue that I kept coming across time and time again was that none of these things fit me and that I kept finding that I felt consistently as if there was something wrong with the world. I kept being told not to ask questions not to question the world around me and the way things were set up but I just couldn’t shake this gut feeling that everything was wrong. Just slightly out of place.
I found that every time that I questioned the established dynamic of the world I was struck down. In Japanese culture there is an ideal that the nail that stands up gets struck down. Meaning that if you question the way the world is or the way society is you will be subjugated into place by one means or another. I found that as a child that those adults in my life were doing this.
They kept pushing me into a line that just didn’t fit me and I had to keep coming back to questioning the way the world was because I couldn’t shake this agitation, this aggravating scratching at the back of my mind that wouldn’t stop gnawing at the back of my mind and try to tell me that I needed to do something that I forgot. Like walking into the kitchen in the middle of the night and not remembering the reason why you walked in. Just standing there awkwardly.
It took a long time to figure out and a long time to finally be able to come to the realization that what the issue was, was that we are all living in a dream world. A world of ideals where we don’t confront reality. We tell ourselves half-truths and hide behind masks that allow us to protect our egos. Like that time you told yourself that you’d take that class. That time that you told yourself that you’d learn something new that you’d quit that job and start something new and that time that you would try to break yourself free of the cycle that continues to keep you trapped in the chains of unhappiness.
“….Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…” And that we have the potential to change the entire world into something else beyond what the current scope of things embodies. We are so scared to go beyond the comfort of what is to be expected and already established. Because it’s established and comfortable it’s safe and we can stay there wrapped in the sheets of comfortable consistent expectation.
The reality is we are so scared of breaking out of that established dynamic of norms that have been established by so many years of history and are constantly being socially being socially shamed into accepting our roles in the way the world is, that we stay in line. When we question the way things are and question the dynamics of our society we are socially shamed into falling in line if we even think about trying to escape what has been established as “reality”. The reality is though that we are really so desperate for acceptance and comfort that we forget that “..we are powerful beyond measure..” and have the ability to accept ourselves and forge new paths and that it’s okay to make mistakes, to take our time and figure it out one step at a time.
The result is us wandering through our lives as passive participants in our own lives accepting our roles in the world without daring to question the status quo and be active participants in our own lives in order to change things and bend things to our wills as if in a lucid dream.
You’re in complete control, you can do what you want, the world can be whatever you want it to be. You can bend reality to your will.
...It’s All just a dream....
