What Are You Doing with Your Life?

Stop a moment and consider the way that you perceive the world. 

Consider, for instance, the way you see love. From the moment you were born, you were subjected to ideas about love that shaped the way you think of it. For you, perhaps love is epitomized by a picture of a happy couple on their wedding day, or a bunch of flowers given as a surprise gift. 

No matter what, you’ve been conditioned to see love in a particular way, depending on your social, economic, and cultural background. But this means that your perspective may be very narrow, and the complex truth of love may be lost on you. 

The key message here is: Your conditioning stops you from seeing things as they are.

Your conditioning stops you from perceiving the world in all its complexity. Life is constantly in flux, but because of the way you see the world, you tend to think of it as fixed. Your mind is tethered by your cultural background, belief systems, and dogma. 

To see how life continuously changes and evolves, you need to be able to change your mind and your perspective along with it. If you don’t attune yourself to life’s subtle, continuous changes, you won’t see the full picture – just your own tiny, static snapshot. 

For instance, if you were to watch a flower bloom and change, your description of it would vary from one day to the next if you were to be truthful about that flower. Life is just like that – it requires intimate attention.

To look at life more truthfully, you have to free your mind from all the grand theories and systems that try to explain it in its totality. This is the hard part. For instance, maybe you think of yourself as a socialist, a capitalist, a Christian, or a Hindu. If you adhere to an ideology or religion, any number of situations will be forced to fit your worldview, even if what they’re telling you contradicts your belief system. 

So how do you attune yourself to the world? You must watch the way your mind moves very carefully. You must observe its workings, almost as if you were watching from the outside. Only then will you begin to understand how your conditioning limits the way you see. 

In this way, you’ll begin to understand yourself and your relationship to the world. That’s the first step toward grappling with the many problems we face – problems that are always changing and evolving, just like life itself.