Actualization

What motivates you?

Do we all have a secret act that proves key to our continued life and happiness within it? I am beginning to believe so, though it is unfortunate. For those of us lucky enough to have discovered what it is that keeps us moving forward in the cliched sense, life must truly be a wonder. If I had ever felt that what was naturally interesting was the best way to push on in life, I would have been struck down with surprise. Continuing that personal note, I have never understood why someone would sacrifice their own personal happiness for any reason, and yet I find myself continually confronted with the idea that without that said sacrifice, happiness is not only a frightfully complex process, but also one that appears simply impossible to achieve.

When I was younger, I remember wondering how it is that people who do a very simple, uninteresting, and repetitive task for their living prevent themselves from going insane. The answer now, I find, is that they are self-anesthetized to their own life. Numb to the idea that their life is now less than what they once believed it could be. The sagging shoulders of a soul that could once have balanced the infinite weight of the world. Can we be so easily broken? Are some of us just not built for success?

Some would say that an element of fate enters into the situation, that yes, success and happiness is just not on the cards for everyone. I say that we have built a world that crushes those that are even fractionally fragile, leaving behind living stepping stones to be used by the next, most ambitious soul. Fate has little to do with life when life is a series of emotionally and intellectually crippling hammer blows and little else. How can we be expected to stay afloat when there is no interest from our fellow man in the continued well-being of others?

For now, I see the mundane as a blessing. When you are without thought or interest, your life becomes a miracle of simplicity. That simplicity is the future of most, and while at first it might seem a less than positive truth, eventually we all learn to embrace it. Mediocrity is not as terrible as it is made out, and happiness is as just as much "not for everyone" as "success" is a predetermined ideal.

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I have always been a supporter of introspection as a form of self-realization, but I have recently come to see that is not a commonly shared view. Now, while how we identify as what "makes sense" to us most naturally is a topic for discussion in and of itself, I prefer to focus instead on the idea of teaching yourself about life through the observations of others rather than yourself.

I realize the narrowness of using my own point of view as a based of the examination of this idea, especially since I only very reluctantly admit that there might be some value in it, but I will continue nonetheless. I feel as though there is something to be said for the internal viewpoint of the common man as opposed to a permanently objective ideal state of observation. With that, I will say that I have very rarely had the pleasure of another party providing anything more than, at best, a moderately in-depth observation of personality, and never a revelation of an aspect of the unknown. I find this troubling because at some point you would expect that you would be graced with an "outside looking in" idea that would give you some perspective into your world. Naturally, a certain amount of thought goes into teaching yourself about yourself, but how much of it comes as a direct result of the input of others? More importantly, how important does the person that grants you a greater internal dialogue become, should that be the case?

I would think that if you were to spend time dedicated to the pursuit of self-realization that you would learn that you cannot know yourself very well at all until you have to come to identify with those that are around you. Oppositely, where is the line drawn between furthering your own intellectual and emotional pursuits and where you become a product of the people which which you surround yourself (for better or for worse)? Assuming that a "happy" medium can be found, as it can be in most aspects of life in general, I do wonder if there is a way of identifying it.