What Are You?

Einstein once said that the most important question you can ever ask yourself is, "Is the world friendly or unfriendly?"

Put another way, "Do you believe life happens TO you, or THROUGH you?"

I believe it must happen through you, that there is no other possible means for life to occur. That is, you are the sole architect of all your experiences, from your birth to your death. There are few who would argue that you are in NO way responsible for your life, that you are quite literally a pinball scattered about by physics, or God, or Zeus, but far more would argue that SOME of life happens to you, and that you are responsible for the rest.

I say, no. It is all or nothing. There is a long argument to be had around this question, and I will not have it here, but consider this: What is your life? Is your life what HAPPENS or what you FEEL after, or while, something happens?

If you were handed a million dollars, you would say - Oh, my life is changed. The million dollars changed my life! But no. The million dollars only changed your life if you decide to spend it. If you don't touch it, it is as meaningless as any other piece of paper. I knew a man once for whom this was true. He died in a very unhappy state, quite alone, and yet his car was filled with uncashed checks. He was worth at least a million dollars. Yet he would not even bring himself to touch it.

Likewise, let us say you have met someone and you believe they would be your perfect mate. And yet, sadly, they are not interested in you. "Oh, cruel life!" But no. What you wanted was not actually THAT person, but the FEELING you believed that would come as a result of that relationship. That feeling is not dead. That feeling is still possible with another person, for in fact, because you never had the relationship with the first person, the feeling was only something you had imagined. You were creating an IDEA of how you wanted to live; it just had not manifested yet in the first person you met that seemed to match that manifestation.

Life happens through you. Your life is what you are feeling about what is happening to you. You are the creator. You are, in fact, God, ever creating and creating and creating. You cannot stop if you wanted to, for you will no doubt go on creating once you have left this body. Every idea is a creation, every fantasy, every thought. Nothing has ever been done that has not been thought first. Thought is the beginning of all life; thought is life itself.

What do you think?

What Have I Done?

I worked the same job for sixteen years. The job was what I did while I was waiting for an opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. The story I told myself about the job was this: I must do this job because I need money and this is the best paying job I can stomach while I wait to do what I really love.

As the years went by and I was still doing the job, I found myself in the same cyclical quandary. I needed the job, I did not like the job, but I did not want to be miserable while I was there. So I made the best of it. And yet, year after year, I identified myself more and more with the job. And then, in fits of depression, I would hate the job, spit at the job, because it was not what I wanted to do. But the bills were due, and I was afraid, and I would go back to the job.

I was trapped, I told myself. What I really wanted wasn't happening and so I was trapped. I told myself I was living a nightmare. I actually said to myself, "This is my nightmare." Stuck in a life I would never have chosen. If that is not a nightmare, what is?

And then one day, I decided to leave. I knew it was not going to be easy, so I gave myself several months. Each day I went into work knowing I was leaving, something changed about it. Perhaps the biggest change of all was this: I realized I had MADE the job. I had created it. Everything about it, everything that kept me there, was my own doing. I had made it so the job meant something to me when in fact it did not. I had made it so I needed the job, even though I did not. I had built the cell, forged the key, locked the door, and then spent year after year rattling the cell bars, crying how I wasn't free. I felt like the man in a movie who comes home one day to find his wife and children killed and then spends the entirety of film searching for justice and answers only to learn, at the grim conclusion, that he had in fact murdered them himself in his sleep.

So it is for all our nightmares, I believe. In our sleeping nightmares, our own imagination conjures our greatest fears for us to live through. In our waking nightmares, we build the dream daily from the belief that we are not free.

This is a little daunting at first, at least for me. I thought, Jesus, if I can create THIS, my worst nightmare, just because I wasn't paying attention, what else could I do? Why, anything, of course. If you want the gift of freedom, you must take it in its entirety.