AUTHOR'S CORNER;

LOST IN YOURSELF

I reckon life does not begin until the journey is taken, freely and fearlessly.  Life does not begin unless you actually decide to begin it; until then you are just going along for the ride, stumbling from one shitty obstacle to another, blundering from one big mess up to another...in other words, you are on auto pilot.  Then you wake up one day and stare in the mirror and notice the lines etched on your once youthful face, get an eyeful of the crop of grey hairs resting on top of your head and look back at yourself through tired eyes.  

Remember all those dreams you had?  What happened?  Remember the first time you fell in love, the second, the third?  Remember how you thought it would never end; how you mapped out your life in that one moment of pure, white, light filled love?  Again and again and again?  Each time thinking, believing that this was it, this was love, utopia.  What happened?  Remember your goals, your mapped out career?  Remember your ideologies; your belief of a better world, a just world?  What happened?  Life happened; work happened, bills happened, relationships happened, kids happened, the menopause happened.....No.  You happened!  

You happened.  And when you happened, you happened upon yourself and inflicted... infected yourself with doubts and hang-ups and the more doubts and hang-ups you accumulated the more frustrations you stored up and the more frustrations you stored up the farther you went into the forest of self doubt and hang-ups.... farther and farther you went, into the deep with nothing but a memory of lost hope and shaky fears for a breadcrumb trail.  At least Hansel and Gretel had each other, you my friend decided to go it alone; in your own head!  In short; you were the worst thing that could happen to yourself!!

I am talking about a twenty first century epidemic!  We are so conditioned to want, to need to compete to prove and be approved that we stop living, we simply act out life; go through the motions, pay the bills, say 'I love you', buy the latest gadget and quietly lay awake each night grudgingly listening to the gentle snores of our better half (or not) and imagine that life must be better for someone else!  We blame the job, the mortgage, the partner, the parents, the foreign neighbours!  We blame everyone and everything around us, but we always fall short of blaming our own selves.  Then you wake up somewhere between forty and fifty and panic that you are nearer to sixty than you've ever been.  And still you refuse to look yourself dead in the eye.  Better to blame outwardly than take the blame inwardly.  

A life spent in blissful ignorance is a life ignorantly spent.  For the people in our lives, the job, the house, those annoying situations did not just happen.  No they did not; we were not remote controlled, drugged, or held at gun point when these things happened; we were present and participating and causing!  We just chose to forget our part in it all and found it easier to remember everyone else's part. We were cowardly enough to hand over the ownership of our mistakes and farther and farther we went into that forest of doubt and hang-ups.  The result?  You lose yourself.  And not to drugs or work or fame.... no you lose yourself big time!  You lose yourself in the one place you are too scared to go, too frightened to look; you lose yourself in the one place that is guaranteed to put the fear of God into you.... yourself!  Because if most of us are honest, we have spent most of our lives running from ourselves; recreating our so called selves, pretending that we are other than ourselves, hiding from ourselves.  After all, who else can you know better than yourself?  Who else is revealed to you in complete form other than yourself?  Whose flaws and ugliness do you really know other than yourself.  The more you run, the more you seek out a hiding place, the further and farther you go into the dark forest; deep into your tangled self, deep into your pretence and denial, deeply lost within the confines of your doubts. 

And auto pilot?  That is just the opium that keeps you sedated.  In order to live life, that life that you once thought you were going to conquer, you need to rescue your mind from yourself and be brave enough to look head on at your reflection in the mirror; I mean your proper reflection, the sad one, the silly one, the frightened one, the one that didn't get it quite right.  And you need to accept, honour and understand ..... only then will the journey properly begin.