Cloudy Mirror

Many of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen next in our lives and so we spend a lot of time and energy trying to control everything that happens in our day-to-day activities. Those of us who act like this are commonly referred to as “control freaks”. It’s not the healthiest way to behave, but I think that we do it, at least in part, because we’re not comfortable with trying to figure things out “on-the-fly” and risking failure. It can be pretty exhausting, and is this kind of behavior really helping us anyway?

The thing that we need to realize is that we’re basically paralyzing ourselves by being so scared of the unknown. Our fear causes us to limit our experiences to only those few that we feel that we can control. We’re missing out on all kinds of things that could teach us about so much about ourselves, like how we act under pressure and how our minds work in less structured situations. Maybe we’re really good at it! Or maybe we’re really bad at it, but we can learn to get better. We’ll never know if we never try.

Without uncertainty, life is just the repetition of outworn memories. There’s no evolution in that, and when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy and decay. – Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success)

Sure, there’s always the risk of screwing something up or of flat-out failure, but most failures aren’t going to kill us. In fact, we may be able to learn more about ourselves from our failures than any carefully planned-out activity. Oops! That didn’t work, so we’ll do it differently next time! I mean, how much is it really going to matter if we don’t plan our two-week vacation down to the minute? Yes, it’s possible that we may miss out on some “must-see” attractions that we wanted to squeeze in, but maybe it would be more fun to just wing it, for once. Just think of the adventures we could have by keeping an open mind and just going with the flow. We could experience some amazing things that very few, if any, other people get to do. Of course it’s possible that we’ll get lost in our wanderings, but maybe we’ll find something amazing that we didn’t know about at our unexpected destination. Most likely, we’ll be able to come out of these unplanned experiences just fine, as long as we remember to use common sense.

I’ve always admired those people who are able to dive head-first into unknown situations and who are able to take a “let’s figure it out as we go along” attitude. But, getting to that point from a “control freak” status takes some doing. It is often suggested to us scaredy-cats that we just do something where it is quite possible that we might fail, but that the failure would be relatively inconsequential. Like, maybe we’ve been wanting to try a new restaurant in an unfamiliar part of a big city. We may have avoided even attempting to get there in the past because we’re scared of getting miserably lost and wasting time. Well, we should pick a day when we have no other commitments so that the time issue is no longer a factor. Then we fill up the gas tank and take a map, a GPS navigation system or another person who can help us find our way there. If we get lost, we use the tools we have to figure it out or we stop and ask for help. Yes, it will be pretty stressful for those of us who are not used to not knowing exactly where we are and exactly where we’re going, but it won’t kill us.

I know that we control freaks have a tendency to start worrying about the “what-ifs” in these kinds of situations before they even begin, but that’s exactly what the problem is. We worry about things that haven’t even happened yet and may not even happen. We just need to learn to relax a bit and see how things turn out. If we have the intellect and skills to plan our lives in excruciating detail, we certainly have the skills to make good decisions, even on the fly. We just need to learn to trust ourselves and our abilities. Most likely, everything will end up being just fine. Just start by taking baby steps and we’ll be jumping off of airplanes in no time! Ok, maybe not.

If we limit ourselves because of fear, we can potentially miss out on getting to know who we really are and what we’re capable of doing. If we don’t ever encounter any new experiences, we limit our intellectual, emotional, spiritual growth as human beings and life can get pretty dull that way. Maybe by allowing ourselves to take more risks and trying new things with less fear, we can break out of our mundane lives and develop into better people than we are now.

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Ah HA! I’m not crazy! I have it right here in writing! Maria Shriver told me so, so it must be true! Well… ok fine. So maybe it doesn’t necessarily make me sane, but I just read her most recent book “Just Who Will You Be?” and I was absolutely thrilled to find that some of the things that she writes about are exactly what has been running through my head lately!

This book is based on a high-school commencement speech that Ms. Shriver gave to her nephew’s graduating class. With this book, she does an amazing job at communicating the message that who you are is just as important as, if not more important than, what you are. Especially when we’re young, we spend so much time trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up and, essentially, how we want to look to the outside world. Usually, that means we try to figure out what career-path we want to take, and sometimes superficial things like how much money we’ll make, or how famous we’ll be play big parts in that process. Ms. Shriver, though, wants to teach us that it’s just as important to think about the kind of person you want to be: what you truly believe in as well as what your passions and dreams are:

The only way to find a life of meaning and joy is to find your own voice, find your own path, follow your own heart, and live your own life, not an imitation of somebody else’s. -Maria Shriver

Figuring out who we are is not an easy task, and since we change over time, we need to constantly reevaluate who we are now and what we want to become in the future. Too often, though, we get caught in the trap of believing that what others think of us is who we are. Ms. Shriver touches upon the fact that a lot of people depend on material items or other superficial traits to define their own value: “I have this cool designer bag, therefore, I am special. People will look at me and my bag and be jealous because they don’t have one.” or “I am famous and I’ve won all of these awards, so that means that people like me and so I must be special.” Unfortunately, as Ms. Shriver tells us, the value of these superficial items and titles fade over time and, at that point, if we haven’t figured out who we are, we can be left feeling empty and unfulfilled.

As you can tell from my previous posts, that emptiness and lack of fulfillment sound particularly familiar to me. That’s where I am now. I am trying to figure out who I am because I haven’t taken the time to figure it out before now. It brings me great comfort to know that with this “awakening” that I’m going through, I seem to be heading in the right direction. Other people have gone through this same “crisis” and have found happiness and fulfillment as a result! That is incredibly exciting to me!

If you can’t tell by now, I highly recommend this book to anyone, whether you’re going through a similar “Who am I?” phase or not. People of any age can find value in Ms. Shriver’s advice, and the best thing is that it’s never too late to change ourselves. This book is a short read, it’s less than 100 pages, and it can probably be finished in an hour or two, so please check it out! For me, it was wonderful to find out that I’m not alone in my search for meaning and that I’m actually kind of on the right track! After reading this little book, I find myself even more inspired to figure out what it is that I’m meant to do here, and I’m thankful to Ms. Shriver for this bit of reassurance and direction at a time when I really needed it!

Posted by pigi under Reviews | 2 Comments »