There’s no such thing as good or bad. There’s no such thing as right or wrong, either. There’s truly only one thing and that is choice. Your choice, that is.
Your choice to make whatever you want from any situation, any circumstance, any energy that occurs in your life.
What “it is” is what it is, period. Most of the time, you can’t change what it is. Or, at least, you can’t preventing it from happening, you can only experience it.
You have such a limited immediate influence on your environment. You can’t prevent an earthquake for happening, for example. You can’t stop people walking away from you. You can’t beat gravity and fly around if you jump off of a building (or, at least you can’t do it in your regular human being form, without some sort of enhancement).
But you can do whatever you can, using everything you learned, to get through an earthquake safely. You can enjoy the presence of people around you while they’re with you. You can paraglide or do sky diving if you want to fly.
Being A Life Director
Many times I’ve read, heard or otherwise being exposed to the fact that we, humans, have a tremendous creative power. All great masters of the world said it, in one form of another. And I thought for a long time that creativity, as a concept, means to be an artist. To create beautiful artwork. To write novels, to make movies, to paint, to sculpt.
It took me quite a while to realize that this is only the “kindergarden” level of creativity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying painting, or sculpting or making great movies are simple, kindergarden things. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and, usually, a lot of time, to become a master in any form of art.
What I’m saying is that our biggest creation may not come in the form of what we perceive as art.
In fact, our biggest creation is our life. Art is great and it’s amazing, emotionally uplifting, inspiring and so on. It’s a great proof of what we can achieve with passion and endurance. But the real game is not there. Art is just the “practice” level of it. It’s just a hint of what we may do. The real game is in designing your life.
And that is such a huge paradigm shifting. I confess it took me a few years to properly integrate this. To properly understand all the implications of this fact. There’s one thing to get it at the intellectual level, and it’s a completely different thing to start doing it. To engage consciously in an effort to re-design and improve your life, just like a painter is engaging consciously each day in painting. Or like a sculptor, or a piano player.
My Life, Take Forty Three
Imagine you are a director and you are directing a movie. You are also the main character of the movie, the producer and the copy guy. You wrote the script, you set up the stage.
The only difference from a real movie is that, every once in a while, other directors are interfering with you and make you part of their movie. Most of the time they do it gently. They ask for permission and they try to persuade you that their involvement will create a better movie. For a while, you play together. Sometimes you enjoy it, sometimes you don’t. Either way, you kinda keep a nice memory of your movie and you exit gently from each other’s movie.
But sometimes they do it aggressively. They jump into your movie without being invited, they mingle with your script. They take advantage of you. Usually, you part ways with anger and keep a bad memory.
At the end of the day, you look at the footage. Sometimes you’re satisfied with the results. Sometimes you don’t. But you can’t edit the movie. The only thing you can do is to film that scene again. What you have is already filmed, recorded, it happened, bye-bye. You can only try another take of the same part of the script, if you want to make it better.
Imagine that. at the end of the day you had only aggressive material. You filmed only scenes with people taking advantage of you. People entering your movie with a very demanding, domineering, maybe humiliating approach.
Now, here’s the key moment.
What do you do now?
You have two options. Option number one: refine the aggressiveness scenes until they are very good aggressive scenes. Option number two: change the story completely and don’t allow those characters in your movie at all.
What will happen if you choose option number one? You got it, you will become very good at playing aggressiveness. Because that was your choice. If you continue to play with aggressiveness, if you try to smooth it, if you try to integrate it, you will end up being a very good aggressive character. Period.
What happen if you choose option number two? Well, you will have to adjust your script and find a way to integrate different characters in your movie. It may take some time, it may create some delays, the movie may seem “stuck” for a while, but if you keep trying, the script will eventually be changed. It may not be as good as you wanted it to be, but it will be about something else. And, in time, the more you film with the new characters, the better you will get at being good with them.
And all this is happening because that was your choice.
Now here comes the most subtle part of this…
In the world of “life directors” words fly fast. Soon, other “life directors” will hear, or somehow learn from somebody, or simply pick up a “vibe” that you’re not into aggressive movies anymore. That you’re into friendship movies, for instance. And, slowly, “life directors” who are into friendship movies will start to be interested about your movie. They’ll mingle more and more with you. Aggressiveness “life directors” will stay away. They know you’re not into that kind of movies anymore, so they won’t waste their time.
And that is the answer to one of the most common questions in our lives: why is this happening to me? Why am I experiencing this? Why am I alone, sad, desperate? Well, because you keep inviting that type of experience in your life. Because the information about your attachment to that type of experience is so strong and so popular and so obvious that other “life directors” on the same vibe with you are instantly attracted to it.
Of course, you may not know that. You may just experience a flow of aggressive behavior and be puzzled about it.
By the way, you can safely replace “aggressiveness” with “poverty”, “depression”, whatever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you keep having those experiences because, at some point in your life, you played very well with other likewise characters. They keep coming back to get another part in the movie, since they had such a good time before, and they will do that until you make the choice to stop them.
It goes like this with every situation in life. It’s what you choose.
So, you see: there’s no such thing as good or bad.
But if you still want to have it that way, ponder this for a while: “The good thing is that you’re the only one directing your life. The bad thing is that you’re the only one directing your life.”
