What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything At All?
No limitations, no restrictions, no caveats, just do the thing you desire to do.
Lots of people talk about bucket lists. Those things they would do without restrictions, obligations, financial issues, and so on.
Additionally, lots of people have things they will do when they have enough money, lose enough weight, get that promotion, publish the book, dump the dead-weight relationship, and so on. Get that one thing done, the prerequisite must be met, and then you do the thing.
While many of those things are probably tangibles, like trips to exotic places, visits to expensive spas, fancy cars, new clothes, and the like, many more are sensations. Experiences. Intangibles.
Often, at least in my life, the restrictions, prerequisites, and the like were covers for other things. Fears mostly. The necessary benchmarks needed to be reached are unnecessary obstacles. While these are frequently blamed on outside influences, the more I look at this the more I think that’s an excuse.
Often, what we would do if we could do anything at all is a lot less grand than it’s played up to be.
It’s the intangible experiences we desire most
Why does anyone think that they need that car, that home, that vacation, that money, and so on? Because we’re led to believe that the material things will make us feel ultimately happy and satisfied.
I’m not entirely discarding that material things can make us happy. Visiting a beautiful place on this planet can make your heart sing, eating that umami-bomb burger can be an incredibly sensory experience, and a home with a great view and familiar things can be a source of incredible satisfaction.
Yet it’s not the material thing that we seek. It’s the sensation that it produces. Feeling content, happy, satisfied, accomplished, or any similar positive. There is an unspeakable sense of rightness that defies both logic and emotion. That, ultimately, is what we seek when it comes to doing this, that, or the other thing.
This is where our consumption-driven, capitalist, fear-based society utterly fucks with us all. Movies, books, TV shows, pundits, and a wealth of other sources imply or state outright that it’s the material where happiness lies.
Take all advertising, for example. If you don’t buy that shiny, you will pay a terrible price far worse than the MSRP. There will be a hole in your life that isn’t being filled. You will have great suffering. Also, you won’t get laid, you’ll be less attractive on every level, and people will think less of you.
They tug at your need and desire to not suffer, to experience positive feelings and emotions, and then you buy to resolve that.
The car, the clothes, and/or the vacation can be incredible and worthwhile. However, they’re not the things we truly desire in life.
You could do anything, really
The truth of the human experience is that most of our limitations are completely artificial. They’re built from a false belief in lack, scarcity, and insufficiency we keep building and reinforcing in our culture.
Yes, there are actual limitations that we do have. Some people live with great privilege and more opportunities to experience this than others. There are people in the world with mental, emotional, and physical limitations they must work with and through. However, everyone everywhere is empowered to do anything at all that brings those positive emotions out.
One of the best codifications of the reality of this comes from the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It is the pursuit of happiness, and difficult to define intangible, that most people give their lives to. Happiness gets tied to everything that they do, and that becomes the central tenet of anything they do. The pursuit of happiness drives society on every level.
Our fear-based consumer society often claims that only via capitalistic materialism can you find happiness. You must spend, buy, replace with better, go big or go home, and the like – or else happiness will elude you.
What if it’s not that complicated and far more readily available to all than that?
Becoming mindful of the artifice
We’ve created some truly amazing tools to connect us together. Wi-fi opens the way to the internet, a trove of information, social media, and free thought that allows us to be virtually anywhere together at any time.
Rather than fulfilling its promise of greater connectivity via technology, it’s instead created greater disconnect. We tune out the world around us for a virtual world, we get caught up in the hype and flash of demagogues and blatant untruths, and in the process divide ourselves from ourselves.
How many times, when you go to a restaurant, do you see a family around the table not talking to one another, not laughing together, but instead in their own worlds on their smartphones? Rather than interact with the people right there with us, we’re instead isolating ourselves in games, social media, and other distractions.
The disconnect goes far deeper than between individuals. We have created a disconnect in our own minds.
Everybody is of three minds. The unconscious mind is how we breathe, our heart beats, our neurons fire, and the minute-to-minute needs of our finite bodies are managed. There, but largely ignorable.
The conscious mind is your self-awareness. It’s your mindset/headspace/psyche self, taking in the people around you, doing things physically, and existing in the here and now, the present. The conscious mind is the human, being. It is how we actively engage the world without and our inner beings within.
At our depths lies our subconscious mind. This is where our beliefs, values, and habits live beside our memories. It’s via our subconscious that we can set routines in place by habit to live by rote. This is how you can be on autopilot and most easily fall prey to outside influences.
Control only exists in our conscious mind.
You can do anything when you start with mindfulness
When we coexist in a society together, a blend of people from different backgrounds, different perspectives, and a wide variety of morality, spirituality, and free will, there’s a need for basic laws. These serve as a framework so that we can function together because human nature at its base is all about survival of the individual first.
Over time, we accepted that in addition to the laws, we needed leaders. We broke ourselves into an utterly artificial system of classes, races, nationalisms, religions, genders, colors, and more. Each has been used to justify oppressions both blatant and subtle, and to strive for control of others.
Our artificial leaders use lack, scarcity, insufficiency, and fears around them to persuade and influence us to live subconsciously. Let the rote and routine carry you along and accept the place that they’ve made for you. Accept these limitations and that you can’t do anything at all because you lack the money, are undeserving, unworthy, and blah blah blah.
If the meaning of life is as simple as I believe – that it’s TO LIVE – what does that mean? It means that we do things to have experiences, learn things, grow, evolve, and explore all the potential and possibilities that these lives have to offer us.
That never begins from without, it only begins from within. Ergo, it’s all about active conscious awareness in the conscious mind.
In other words, it’s all about mindfulness.
Specifically, mindfulness of our individual, inner mindset/headspace/psyche selves. To become consciously aware and mindful, all we need to do is ask questions in the here and now like,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What are my intentions?
- What do I desire to do?
Asking and answering these, here and now, puts you in your conscious mind.
This puts you in control
The only person over which you have any control, whatsoever, is you. You have no control at all over anyone else. Period.
Likewise, you have zero control of the weather, traffic, sunrise, or anything else outside of yourself. Despite all the messages that you can have more power over this, that, or the other thing, the truth is that you can’t.
This, however, is good. Why? Because nobody truly wants to have control over anything other than their own lives, experiences, and ultimately their feelings.
When you stop living subconsciously and start to apply active, conscious awareness, you gain control over your thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, and approach to it all. If you are thinking about something you’d rather not be, you can change it. The same goes for what and how you feel, what you intend, and ultimately what you do and don’t do.
The car, the house, the amazing food, and/or the vacation experience aren’t the things you truly desire. It’s the sensation, the feeling, the emotional experience that you’re genuinely after. That’s not to say they won’t contribute to that achievement, it’s that they themselves aren’t the answer.
We are all of us – ALL OF US – empowered to have experiences. In that way, we live and evolve. The reality is that you don’t need to do all the bucket list things, have the best of everything, and take exotic trips to do anything at all to reach that sensation of happiness. It already exists within us and our reach.
The point is you can have, be, and do the material things that make you feel good, empowered, and happy. Just recognize that they in and of themselves aren’t what you’re truly ever after. You can do anything at all because the intangibles you seek are abundant and available to you.
What will you do when you realize that you can do anything at all with the intangible to define what makes you happy?
This is the six-hundred and thirty-sixth (636) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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