Our lives are like trains, driven by emotional energy and loaded with our expectations, sometimes meeting obstacles and sometimes becoming derailed on the curves. Daily, we meet oncoming trains loaded with the expectations of others. If we do not switch to parallel tracks we risk collision.
Each of us carries passengers that are our cultural values and habits and our past experiences. They are subject to discipline, exchange seats occasionally and carry a variety of costume changes. Many of the passengers on our life trains are judges, jailers, bill collectors, daydreamers, do gooders, have nots, can’ts, won’ts, shoulds, and afraid tos brought aboard years ago.
Our talkative, sometimes accusing or sermonizing passengers, and with them our expectations, evolve from all of the demands, warnings, facts, fantasies, slogans, proverbs and other educating factors to which we have been exposed during our lifetime. They present us with demands concerning our direction, safety and comfort. They fear possible collision with oncoming trains and peer anxiously out of the windows.
Our expectations are generated by the “shoulds” among our passengers. That is, we expect that things will be the way we believe they should be. Sometimes confused with wants and wishes, our expectations spawn many of our frustrations, angers and disappointments as well as our feelings of satisfaction, success and fulfillment.
At the very root of our frustrations are our perceptions of what is right, beautiful, appropriate, just, best and expected by others, and what we need to make us happy, all of which are far more often the products of culture and education than of personally determined values.
We live today in a world of printed and televised romance, affluence and excitement. Bedroom scenes tell us that we should expect lovemaking that is like a ballet dance with utter satiation and gratification every time. We are led to expect life in the fast lane with unimpeded views of our destinations and anesthetized memories of the past, individual worth so profound as to be recognizable to all who would look, and power to push our own buttons without interference; the right to be right, the right to be heard, the right to proceed through life always having our way, having nothing in our way and with little need to go out of our way.
We find ourselves holding on, holding out, holding in, holding away, holding up or holding down—but always holding, when what we need is to let go.
We wonder why we are not happy and seem not to understand that happiness (as a goal) is elusive because it is illusive. We cannot achieve happiness to any degree until we give up believing in our right to it. It simply is not true that by mere virtue of our existence (or U.S. citizenship) we are owed happiness any more than we are owed any other benefit.
Probably, unless we are homeless, naked or hungry (and it behooves us to remember that there are many who are), each of us could say that right now, this minute, we have everything we need…to be happy, or content…or just, perhaps, to be. And it is at this point that we must begin if we desire to change the way we feel.
All aboard??? |
