Working With What We Are
We are a complicated construct.
Having experienced much and acted and reacted over and over, I’ve come to understand some things about my self-nature that I did not before. My patterns of behavior informed me of that. I noticed those patterns in other people too, and I began to form some ideas about it.
The self is malleable. Even if our self-nature is constant, the way we perform ourselves in the world can often change. The problem often comes about where there’s a misalignment between our self-nature and our patterns of behavior; particularly the ones that clearly make things worse.
I speak of anxiety, compulsive actions, a tendency to make perceptions negative, laziness, anger, and especially a lack of concern for anything.
The problem is that, no matter what we’re dealing with, we’re dealing with it in our skin: the unique qualia of our experience subsumes us in a tidal wave.
But the world is elsewhere, for sometimes it feels aligned with us just fine, and other times there’s a sort of disconnection, like cracks slowly forming in a bridge. And, as it turns out, our subjectivity is what makes that bridge possible.
Everyone has something objective in them, as it is rigidly part of them — such things include trauma, self-nature, knowledge cultivated through training, etc. However, we are interacting with the world and life through our particular mirror-self. And then the question stands: will we be reflecting what we seem to feel, or will we be reflecting the beauty of everything at once?
The weight of the world rests on those who can enjoy their subjectivity to the best of their ability, even in spite of those immutable qualities. We may have faced a multitude of obstacles and come out in pain, but in spite of that pain, we find something has changed within us — the experience has toughened us.
The self is not an easy thing to deal with. Most of us have contended with a reactive type of life, wherein things happen and to us and we must find ways to accept them. But in some deeper part of us, the self-nature is clamoring for change. For it seems that no matter what lies we tell ourselves, a part of us understands what’s true and false.
Ultimately, the emotions we contend with should only bolster our understanding of all that we know. And in the end, the quality of our contemplation and decision-making will result in what we end up feeling.
Otherwise, there would be no logical way to explain how it happened.
Whatever it is we are, that is what we must work with. And the world gives us the tools to mold a self we can strive to be. So be it if it’s easier to linger in negativity and laziness — it is not a good template for our future generations.
I hope you got something of value out of this piece, and I appreciate your time very much. It’s been a while since I wrote something on Medium. Thank you!
