27.6.2024:
Just yesterday before I started my usual morning work routine I overheard my wife Nicole crying in the hall during her attempts to get to our bathroom.
After an accident during which she broke her right leg seven weeks ago, her leg, unfortunately, doesn´t heal as fast as she would appreciate, not to mention the fact that there are some complications caused by her body refusing a metal implant which was inserted into her leg during surgery.
If you have ever had a similar experience, dear reader, when you cannot leave your house for a long period and every aspect of your life depends on other people’s help, then you can imagine what it does to one´s mental health.
I hesitated only a few seconds when I overheard my wife crying, got up and went to ask her what was wrong and to hug her.
As I expected, she was in an awful state of mind which took her to very dark places.
At those moments our logical mind can convince us that everything in our life is turning into dust and ashes.
She started to reflect on all her and our traumas, challenges, hardships etc. that we have been through since we were together and concluded that she would never finish her master’s degree in psychology, that she would never be a mum because we cannot conceive because she is unable to lose weight and her health is in ruins altogether, that she is a terrible carer, which was her job occupation for many years before she broke her leg, a terrible daughter, a terrible wife etc, etc.
We all have been there. We all know how our minds can work and betray us.
I immediately realized that I must put everything aside and talk her out of it, to calm her down.
We Always Imagine The Worst
Have you ever noticed that children have some sort of self-destructive nature? They can touch a hot hob if you don´t stop them, run into a very busy road, try to catch a honey bee by bear hands etc.
But this is the way how we are getting to know the world around us when we are small children. We are curious. We want to touch those things, we want to smell them, we want to taste them.
Of course, some of those things that we want to get to know are dangerous but we are missing the experience to know that. Therefore we have parents who stop us at the last second before we touch the hob, before we are hit by a car, before we are stung in an attempt to catch and eat a honey bee, etc.
We gather life experiences and how we grew up, and before we know it we would never get the idea of touching a hot hob again and we laugh at an image of us doing that as a kid.
For example, my family circulated a funny story about how I decided to study electro-engineering at a high school after an attempt to explore the power of electricity with a fork that I inserted into an electric plug.
Of course, our memory, and our survival brain help us not to cause ourselves self-harming accidents, it helps us avoid danger or anything that could cause physical or mental pain.
It is quite a cool thing this survival brain, until is not.
With more and more experience we gather through our life, more and more alarms against potential danger, against potential pain our survival brain launches.
The problem here is our imagination which in cooperation with our survival brain creates vivid pictures of potential future scenarios. I can assure you that at times of extreme emotional load, at times of struggles, hardships, etc., or even when we make difficult life decisions our survival brain in cooperation with our imagination projects us the worst possible scenarios that might happen. As a result of that, we start to feel anxious, overwhelmed, scared, helpless, indecisive, etc., and we can fall into a very deep depression.
All of a sudden our system that has helped us to survive our whole life becomes our enemy without us even realizing it.
For people who experienced a life trauma, those imaginations are even more vivid because they can raise negative emotions that they have connected with the specific traumatic memory. These vivid memories are usually launched by specific triggers that our memory connects with a specific trauma. But traumas are a topic for another post maybe in the future.
At that moment one can become paralysed in a situation that has seemingly no solution.
Pretty much that happened to my wife yesterday.
Therefore, we need a good friend, a good partner, or even a therapist who can listen to us in those moments of darkness and tell us that our current difficult circumstances don´t mean that they will last forever, that we will from now on experience only pain.
It must be someone who knows us very well, who can tell us that we will be OK, that in the end, we will manage to overcome all our troubles, that we are not alone, who knows us so well that can give us examples from our past when we successfully overcame difficult circumstances, or someone who can by giving the right questions helps us to find the right answers and overcome our survival brain, our anxiety that consumes us at those moments.
Is It Good To Dream Big Or Not?
Of course, imagining the worst possible scenarios based on previous negative experiences was just a part of my wife´s problem the day when she fell into a trap of depressive thoughts.
The second part of her problem has a lot in common with life goals and dreams we all have.
I guess, you agree with me that we need the life dreams and goals that we want to achieve. We need a vision that gives us direction, and motivation that gives us a sense of purpose in life.
Dreams and goals are different for everyone. For someone, it could be money, a luxury car,
a big house on a sea coast, a good career, etc. For someone else, it could be a good parent, child, grandchild, etc. And, someone else would like to become a recognized and famous actor, singer, director, musician, artist, etc. Perhaps, there are as many human dreams and goals as stars in the night sky.
In my opinion, our life dreams and goals should be those that help us to become the best version of ourselves while we attempt to achieve them.
My wife for example wants to become a psychologist or therapist to help others. She also wants to be a mother. She wants to live in the countryside surrounded by animals, and she would like to be able to communicate with my family in the language of my origin, in Czech, and so on.
As I have mentioned, life dreams and goals are important for us. But there lies a problem., and that problem is when our dreams and goals become our obsessions.
An Epidemic Of Scarcity
In one of my previous posts “Are You Willing to Dare Greatly” I wrote that we live in a society of scarcity. That idea comes from Brené Brown, author of the book: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
From the moment when we wake up, we start to complain that we don´t have enough sleep, that we don´t have enough energy, that we are too busy to manage everything because we don´t have enough time, we don´t have enough money, and so on.
Modern society teaches us to look up to celebrities in all different areas of human activities who are pictured as some sort of extraordinary super people without any imperfections with whom we as ordinary mortals cannot compare ourselves. We become absolutely oblivion to the fact that those people usually had to work hard for many years to achieve what they achieved, to get where they are just now.
We can even start to compare our lives with our friends, relatives, neighbours, etc., and think about where in our opinion they are in life more successful than we are. We only see their success, and, that creates even more sense of scarcity.
Not only that we experience at these moments unpleasant emotions such as jealousy, frustration, failure, anger, impatience, bitterness, etc., but we also start to turn our big dreams and goals into obsessions. We start to focus on the dream and goal itself which becomes more important than the journey that we realize on our way to achieve those goals and dreams, more important than people that we meet, more important than skills that we learn, etc. This kind of focus causes even more of the above-mentioned emotions and we get into a vicious circle of constant hunting for something without enjoying experience of the life itself.
Do you know the saying: “The appetite is growing together with bigger and bigger amount of food.” The same applies to our lives.
We spend a lot of our lifetime and energy chasing something that we often forget to enjoy the fact that we are even alive.
For example, we might think that we have financial problems and that higher income would sort it out. So, we start to chase a career with an income that we think might satisfy us. When we finally achieve that goal, we feel a huge relief until we realize that with our income our expenses are growing exponentially and that we need to increase somehow our income again, and we can start all over again. And, we are never happy, we are never satisfied, because we allowed our goals to become our obsessions. We allowed them to own us, and what owns us controls us, controls when we can and cannot be happy. This kind of obsession can be as dangerous as an addiction to alcohol, drugs, etc.
Are The Life´s Goals and Dreams Bad Or Good?
Well, I believe that the lines above might be quite confusing and might some of you ask if this guy (myself) has all the wheels in the gear mechanism alright? Is it good to have life´s goals, dreams, and visions, or not?
Just last Tuesday I had a phone call with one of my very good friends with whom I share a lot of common opinions, life philosophy, etc. She has been sort of my first mentor.
My friend and I share one important personal characteristic. We are both artists. I am a writing author, she is a cameraman.
As long as I have known her she had this big dream of hers that she will make big Hollywood movies, that she will make a movie that could get Oscar, make movies for NETFLIX, etc.
Her clarity for her dream has been for me always inspiring. I have achieved that kind of clarity quite recently compared to her. However, her hunger and determination were for me sometimes scary. Sometimes, it seemed to me that she would be able to sacrifice everything just to achieve her big dream.
And, before you knew it, I was doing the same thing just in a different area.
Just during our last call that I mentioned above, we concluded that to be an artist, to have an artistic mind is simply something that always has been part of who we are, and for that reason, we will be forever artists, no matter if she will walk on a red carpet for golden Oscar, or if I will ever write a book that will be published, etc. We are who we are and no one can take it from us.
I will keep writing as well as she will keep shooting, no matter if we will achieve our big dreams or not in our arts.
It doesn´t mean that we have given them up, it just means that we accept our life as it is right now, and that we can appreciate our lives right now in the present moment with what we have, and what we achieved so far.
It is not a bad thing to have a big dream, goal, or vision, but it is bad to give them power over our happiness and joy.
For instance, for me, the ultimate key to joy lies in very brief moments when I lie with my wife on our bed by an open window with our cats, all cuddled together while rays of the sun fall on our faces and a fresh breeze brings clean air inside. In moments like this, I feel absolutely content, joyful and even happy. And, these moments are even more important than our big goals, dreams, and visions.
So, again, it is not a bad thing to have big dreams, goals, and visions because they can direct us, they can give us a sense of life purpose, they help us to become the best version of ourselves, but only under a condition that we will not become obsessed by them, and by the fact that we haven´t achieved them yet.
Some goals and dreams are even so big that might not happen in our lifetime. And, it is also alright, as long as we remember that no matter what we will be always OK, that even without them we can be joyful.
The answer for contentment in life in general is in my opinion acceptance. Acceptance that our life is as is and that we are who we are exactly in this present moment, that we have what we have.
Again, acceptance doesn´t mean that we give up. Acceptance means that we are OK with the fact that we haven´t achieved our big goals and dreams yet, that we might get there eventually as long as we keep making steps towards them, and in the meanwhile we can be joyful in our present moment as often as possible because the life is full of suffering even without us imagining problems that have not happened yet and might not even happen either.
George