explore and gain better control over how you think through creative writing prompts with the pursuit of Wonder guided Journal all the ways things could go the link is in the description a tire that's flat a disease a desire fears in front of you fears that hold so still you could study them like pieces on a chessboard it's not the large things that send a man to the mad house death he's ready for or murder robbery fire flood no it's the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the m house not the death
of his love but a shoelace that snaps with no time left the dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there Charles Bowski at some point for most of us knowingly or unknowingly we become someone whom we said we would never be we reached that age in form that didn't seem real or possible as a child soon we barely even remember that child they become a distant stranger their form now seeming impossible their playfulness joyfulness and innocence is reduced by bitterness frustration and cynicism of course
we cannot conquer time and age they are invincible opponents who beat on us our entire lives waiting to take us whenever they wish but we can perhaps conquer ourselves we can fight our way back to at least aspects of that childlike nature we once knew to degrees of that joy and light-heartedness so much of our anger bitterness cnic ISM loss of joy and playfulness and so on is understandable at an early age we were told or at least given the impression that the justification for our existence for love and acceptance was contingent on our success
and achievements our ability to live and act certain ways and so most of us accepted this offer we sacrificed our light-heartedness and joyfulness and we began on our journey toward the so-called Promised Land of achievement and solemnity along the way we encountered countless other people on their own passage who too had traded large amounts of their joy and play some of these people were awful to us in both small and big Ways by intention or by accident we were repeatedly screwed over or mistreated by people and circumstances we began to realize how terribly unfair and
unbalanced the world is we began to despise things and people we didn't even know or understand we learned to become hard shelled to protect against the incoming debris and we learned to be forceful and disagreeable to continue forward then finally regardless of whether we became particularly successful or not we found or will find that the joy and playfulness we sacrificed does not necessarily await Us in Greater form at the end of it all instead the majority of what awaits us is a pile of trivialities and annoyances amounting to exhaustion cynicism and apparent futility of course
there's plenty of room in this pile for a sense of purpose pride and achievement but how many of us really find or require these things along the way and for the lucky ones amongst us who do how many of us acquire them free of great sacrifices that don't ultimately equate to the same sort of hard shelled numbness in the words of the great German philosopher Arthur schopenhauer a man is never happy but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so he seldom attains his goal and when he does
it is only to be disappointed he's mostly Shipwrecked in the end and comes into haror with Mast and rigging gone and then it is all one whether he is happy or miserable for his life was never anything more than a present moment always Vanishing and now it is over so much of our anger bitterness cynicism and loss of joy and playfulness is not solely because of the conditions of our life but rather the conditions of our perception our expectations and desires our cynicism anger and bitterness can often find their origins in a strange and paradoxical
Place optimism and hope our negative responses are often partly the result of a terribly misguided and false belief that we likely formed and sustained in youth the belief that life will always feel the same as it once did that it will always be light and filled with the helium of party balloons that those Dreadful adults were wrong that we would never and could never be like that dreary old man next to us on the train who scoffed at our loud laughter that woman who frantically screeched at us for goofing around in the convenience store or
that man who nastily yelled at us to stop skateboarding on The Ledges but with this belief we took and drove the same stake of optimism through our hearts that those individuals once did over time as the days began to rush by and we saw more and more things go wrong we asked more and more questions we didn't know the answers to and were required to do more and more stuff we didn't want with little to no reprieve at least on an unconscious level we likely began to understand those loathsome individuals perhaps we began to share
sensibilities with them perhaps if we were not careful we became or will become one of them ourselves for when the smack of age and time and the compounding tedium of adulthood hits us if we are not ready able to block evade or handle it it can knock us out completely somewhat paradoxically an effective way we can reduce the intensity with which we might come to experience bitterness and stuper in life is to let go of our optimism that particular form of optimism that has us still thinking that if we do all the right things in
all the right ways life will be resolvable the trivialities and tragedies will subside and we will find childlike Joy again that joy in fact comes from in large part giving up on this ideal it comes from letting go and accepting what is inevitable and uncontrollable it is the lesson taught by so many of the most potent and enduring philosophies from dosm to stoicism to Buddhism to philosophical pessimism he who wishes to take control of the world and acts upon it I can see that he will not succeed for the world is a Divine vessel it
cannot be acted upon as one wish he who acts on it fails he who holds on to it loses wrote Lau in the fundamental DST text the doubted Jing the French philosopher Alber Kimu famously coined the term the Absurd when referring to the nature of Humanity's relationship with the world for cimu Humanity is embedded with the insatiable need for ultimate meaning and yet the universe seems to lack any provisions for this meaning Camu wrote man stands face to face with the irrational he feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason the ABD is
born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable Silence of the world neither mankind nor the universe is absurd in itself but the absurdity is born of the relationship between them likewise slightly extending the scope of this idea this also applies to the impulse for ultimate control and joy met with the inability to control much of anything and a life filled with frustrations confusions and disappointments but life is not frustrating or cruel or disappointing on its own the frustration and disappointment are born of the confrontation between our expectations and reality we can change
what we experience by changing how we see and consider things Kimu goes on to argue that although The Human Condition is absurd the Absurd can nonetheless still be filled with passion and Beauty if we choose to see it that way the mundane can be potent and beautiful even the so-called annoying and bad can be potent and beautiful I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things things then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful I do not want to wage war against what is ugly I
do not want to accuse I do not even want to accuse those who accuse looking away shall be my only negation and all in all and on the whole someday I wish to be only a yes s wrote the philosopher Friedrich n of course it's equally important to note and recognize that negative responses to the world like anger frustration or even bitterness and cynicism are not always bad they are not only understandable but they can often be reasonable and healthy we should be upset when things go wrong that we could have prevented we should be
defiant and assertive when someone crosses our boundaries or tries to take advantage of us we should be cautious and skeptical of things and people and of course we should take the responsibilities of our life seriously and we should have goals and aspirations when working to let go a bit more in life we shouldn't throw our hands up with utter indifference but rather loosen up our grip or perhaps better simply reconsider the meaning of our grip that is how serious everything we are clinging to ultimately is or isn't in the end we all fall into Oblivion
along with all that we cling to our grips released for us and so what's important is that in the process of trying to protect ourselves in this world we don't go so far that we lose ourselves to this world while we are still here we don't have to become the person we never wanted to be we can realize that things are complicated and hard and tragic and tedious but that we could still experience joy and playfulness nonetheless we can still see things with fresh curious and excited eyes and we can accept the Absurd and uncontrollable
nature of everything and we can laugh instead of scoff thank you so much for watching one of the most important things we can do in life is better understand and gain control over how we think to have more say over what we experience we must work to make some amount of our unconscious thought patterns conscious of course this can be extremely difficult but with the right tools time and effort it gets easier I created a guided Journal designed to help with this process called all the ways things could go rather than starting with the blank
page with this guided Journal you're given thought-provoking prompts designed to stir your creativity coax out your personal values and promote new ways of thinking that might otherwise be hard to arrive at for example on page 50 you're given the prompt write your obituary this is intended to challenge you to consider yourself from a different vantage point in this case after you're gone almost tricking yourself into uncovering what truly matters to you when all is said and done it gets you out of the way so you can better see what's important if you're interested the link
is in the description below it's available both as a hard cover and downloadable ebook and of course as always thank you so much for watching in general and see you next video
