There we are, spending our limited lives stretching, reaching for more.
We seek serenity in the promise of our potential and expect the moving target to stop, forever at infinite happiness.
Sometimes I wonder why we project ourselves that way, thinking that happiness is over there, just over that mountain.
We climb and struggle through thick and thin, in the hopes of reaching that goal.
The need to keep going is stronger than we are because we believe that the “I” in us will finally find serenity in that imagined promise of the idyllic eternal.
As if time would then suddenly stop and we could live in the bliss of that moment forever.
We probably wouldn’t even realize it because by then, the idyllic future would be another!
Could it be that in equating happiness to the future we are actually splitting ourselves in two?
Could that future be nothing more than an abstraction?
If the future is nothing more than an abstraction then our struggle for serenity is actually causing the opposite, our insecurity.
The wind keeps blowing; we will never catch up to it.
Even thinking about thinking is already creating a loss and that split causes our existential anxiety because the actual experience we are thinking of is gone.
The awareness of the thought is already behind the moment and therefore it is gone.
The “I” splits off into an imagined future while the “me” remains, feeling worthless for not getting there fast enough.
So the antidote is the now, but somehow, our ambitions, all too often, lead our present moment to go unnoticed.
I wonder how that applies to the process of creation.
While we are lost in the act of creation, we are not aware of the thoughts regarding that creation.
We just are.
Being in the flow is tantamount to experiencing an ongoing state of nirvana.
This is the place where we find the most serenity, wholeness and fulfillment.
Perhaps the reason artists create, at whatever expense and effort, is that in that space lies the finitude of time, awareness and consciousness; and as its margins blur we find infinite satisfaction.
By Boky & Blake