Don’t fight with what is
5th October 2021
The last few weeks and months have been rough in my marriage. In the pursuit of the perfect family life, I’ve been in a constant battle with my husband to be the father and husband in my mind he should be. And it’s been an absolute disaster of constant fighting and resentment building up, especially on his part. But this weekend after a big fight we had a break-through and I realised I had been doing it all wrong and I had put my thoughts of what should be ahead of what it was, and that was what had created all the pain.
The mind, is an amazing tool, and as humanity we have used it to achieve the most amazing feats, but my god it has a penchant for imagining alternative realities that have nothing to do with that is actually in front of us. And so we spend half (more than half!) our days imagining, creating, rumination and sketching our ideal life in our heads and then we get onto make it come alive. But what about if all that work was only a way to fighting what is in front of us. What if there was a lot less value in all that mental (and it’s physical manifestation) back and forth than we think.
In my experience, when I try to change other people and even my circumstances I’m just trying to make myself feel safe, secure and loved. And that for sure is what we’re told to do from an early age that our happiness and our internal states are linked to what happens out there and how others relate to us. But this weekend the penny dropped for me and I really think this may not be the case? That for most people in our western world, where our primary needs are mostly met our inner feelings of safety, love and security come from inside us, is something that we are able manufacture or destroy depending on how we relate to the world.
And that’s exactly what I was referring earlier, when I ‘think’ of the world instead of ‘being’ in the world and when I fight with it in my mind, which in turns translates into action it always ends badly and I always end up having to say sorry for it. From now on, my motto is going to be to try and be more aware of what is actually happening in the moment and to try and experience it and learn from it as it’s happening as for what I’ve seen so far, it works much much better than the other alternative.