Time goes by quickly and as another year comes to a close, so too does a decade. How have you spent this decade? How much time was focused outside, in your reality? Consider that idea, outside in your reality.
You created this reality for yourself. The people in it, the house you live in, and the landscape around you. All of it came into being because you consciously or unconsciously allowed it to be so. I want to spend some time exploring the unconscious part of your reality.
From infancy, you have subconsciously taken in information, creating a library of experiences that have been layered to create your own personal view of the world. Inside you is a desire to be loved. This is a common thread that runs throughout everything in existence and is paradoxically why there is so much hate in the world. The love that people are seeking outside of themselves is finite and will never fill the tank, so to speak. Depending on your innate nature, people may take the lack of love from others personally, as if it has something to do with them. A bit self-centered if you really think about it.
The demands of the external world are just that, demands. Each year the pace of life gets quicker and every generation will tell you, more times than not with an exhausted sigh, how times were slower when they were younger. A refrain that repeats with each decade that disappears. So much is designed to pull you away from your inner world and yet how many decades does it take to see that that is where you have to look to find everlasting peace?
Getting back to the library, where silence is golden. The library of experiences needs shelves and a way to be organized so that there is some order to how you think and feel about the world outside of you. Taking the time to understand that is what taking a journey through the world of self is all about. How do you react to situations? Why do you react to situations?
Taking any given situation from your past and seeing the outcome, completing a full circle that moves on to the next moment in your life can allow you to see patterns that you play out. Contrasting them to other situations, one can ask, are there similarities here? Is there a common thread? If there is, then are you ok with that? If so, why? If not, also why?
Genetics plays a part in this as well and observing one’s family dynamics can help one to understand what books they’ve inherited. The library analogy, I feel, is important because it offers the possibility to discard books that no longer serve you. Books that may seem childish to your eyes, being of middle age perhaps.
When you hold these books in your hands and consider their value to you, before throwing them away, ask yourself what role did they play in your past? Have you read it over enough? Perhaps too many times? Can you let it go for good? Why are you holding on to it? Did you write this book, or did someone write it for you? What books did you write?
The heaviness of that last question may clear out a lot of the shelves of your library. This can be upsetting or liberating. This is your choice and describes your attitude to life and your willingness to become more than who you are at this moment.
Personally, removing time from the equation has been very helpful. By doing this you remove, remorse, guilt, regret and general malaise. What’s done is done is fine but should be followed with what to do now.
Taking the time to explore what you are made of from an introverted as well as an observer's point of view can help you to see what you choose to be and who decided what you should be.
If seeking love outside yourself is a driving force in your life, then how is it possible to live your life with any love for yourself? It takes energy to get to know yourself and as one gets older and feels that they don’t have as much energy as they did when they were a kid, perhaps this is the reason for that? What truly causes the aging of the cells? What does everything on the planet desire, love, including you and all that you’re made of.
As the next decade begins, the journey of self-inquiry continues, but with a deeper understanding of where the books in my personal library have come from and more awareness of the ones that I wrote of which I can be most proud of, in splendid isolation, under a tree near a flowing brook, while eating an apple that unconditionally loving mother earth gave me. The delicious apple was free, by the way.