Giving Up To Live

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” ~ John Steinbeck

This saying by Steinbeck could be descriptive of the evolution of my being, my philosophy for living. I tried to control so much of where my life was going that the sole purpose seems to have been the ability to master, to control the outcomes of the situations that I encountered. I tried to control my emotions. I tried to fix people who were broken. Fix them even when they didn’t wish to be fixed. I looked at the way that I wished things to be. I was the anti-Zen master.

That way of driving through life just left me tired and also left me without laying down any type of foundation for my own happiness. It was like I was drinking the poison meant for other people, keeping them safe from the poisons that they desired. I would drink the hemlock for the good of all, regardless if I wanted it or not. Much of my young adult life was throwing life vests to people who only desired to drown in their behavior, their lifestyles. I didn’t realize that there were certain people who didn’t care if they hurt the ones that they said they loved. A whole period of my life seems to have been grayed out somehow, just a shadowy part of my lifetime.

But there came a point where I had to root out that way of being or I would have just been devoured by it. I gave up on having any effect on the world around me. Now that may sound bad, but when I did this transformation, the opposite happened. It was almost as if I was in a dark room thinking that the light was on when in actuality I was bumping around in the blackness of my life. When I grew tired of all the misery that people were bashing me in the head with, the lights came on. I quit betraying myself to the will of others.

And once the lights came on for me, it was extraordinarily easy to look around and hunt down those personal shadows that were trailing me. For shadows have no place to hide in the light.