I once wanted to see myself as a writer, as a person gifted with a skill to put words together to say profound and wondrous things, to amaze readers with thoughts and emotions that would open their minds and free them from the shackles of fears that oppress us from without and from outside in this culture.
What I have found in sharing personal letters is that most people personalize the thoughts and feeling in the words to a point where they either fall in love or become defensive, accepting the concepts and therein the person who they do not really know or rejecting them before ever knowing them.
This is an attempt to reach beyond that superficial and over-personalized communication, an attempt to find your mind open, objective, and even eager to understand the concepts, thoughts, feelings, and playfulness in these words without judging the writer, without leaping to any assumptions or conclusions that you know me. For how can anyone truly know another without spending time looking into each others eyes, talking about what matters most to them in this life, and sharing much more than a few words on paper.
With that premise, this is an attempt to explain happiness...
Someday in life maybe you'll find out that it is more important to have someone who understands you and loves you unconditionally than to be in love. As much as the culture we live in emphasizes marriage and romance and happily ever after, that is a shared delusion, albeit a very pleasant one at times. What is real and everlasting is understanding, knowledge that you exist as you are in someone else's mind, that they understand you, accept you, and love you completely as you are.
Until we find this, we search for something that is missing, something we can't always explain, but that search destroys the commitments and undermines the bonds we try to maintain, ultimately exposing the delusions of happiness for what they are, something the world tells us we should want, not what we actually need inside.
Happiness is letting go of the fantasies the world forces upon us in fairy tales and cultural stories, leaving behind the fear and self-doubt that can come from not having such perfection in our lives, and opening our minds to the rare opportunities to share honesty and unconditional love. Love that asks for nothing more than for you to be who you are and share as you wish.
The challenge to accepting this is in realizing much of everything we've known and thought we wanted all along is not really what we need. Much of the giving and taking we do in life is out of blind desperation to find something that is not attainable until we resolve the blind desperation and accept ourselves as we are, flaw and as beautiful as we want to be, for beauty is openness, gentleness, kindness, strength, security and ultimately, happiness.
Do not be fooled by the surface, the superficial visual definition of beauty accepted today, for it is as fleeting as it is a momentary snapshot of our culture only viewed through other people's eyes. Even in the physical world, it is viewed by just one of five senses. How we do not see the limited judgments of beauty we accept as a definition of what beautiful is can only be explained by a cultural blindness to true beauty. An unwillingness to use much more than a single physical sense, sight, to define one of the most important concepts in our culture.
The layers of delusion are thick with such self-deception. This moment I ponder but two of them, beauty and happiness, and I am sad that both are so misunderstood and misinterpreted by so many. My hope is that, by exploring these thoughts in these words, we may find some clarity and relief from the delusions and in this knowledge, find a smile that let's us know we are not alone, we are understood, and we have a rare moment of true happiness and beauty amidst the collective delusions of our culture.
hl,
ric
What I have found in sharing personal letters is that most people personalize the thoughts and feeling in the words to a point where they either fall in love or become defensive, accepting the concepts and therein the person who they do not really know or rejecting them before ever knowing them.
This is an attempt to reach beyond that superficial and over-personalized communication, an attempt to find your mind open, objective, and even eager to understand the concepts, thoughts, feelings, and playfulness in these words without judging the writer, without leaping to any assumptions or conclusions that you know me. For how can anyone truly know another without spending time looking into each others eyes, talking about what matters most to them in this life, and sharing much more than a few words on paper.
With that premise, this is an attempt to explain happiness...
Someday in life maybe you'll find out that it is more important to have someone who understands you and loves you unconditionally than to be in love. As much as the culture we live in emphasizes marriage and romance and happily ever after, that is a shared delusion, albeit a very pleasant one at times. What is real and everlasting is understanding, knowledge that you exist as you are in someone else's mind, that they understand you, accept you, and love you completely as you are.
Until we find this, we search for something that is missing, something we can't always explain, but that search destroys the commitments and undermines the bonds we try to maintain, ultimately exposing the delusions of happiness for what they are, something the world tells us we should want, not what we actually need inside.
Happiness is letting go of the fantasies the world forces upon us in fairy tales and cultural stories, leaving behind the fear and self-doubt that can come from not having such perfection in our lives, and opening our minds to the rare opportunities to share honesty and unconditional love. Love that asks for nothing more than for you to be who you are and share as you wish.
The challenge to accepting this is in realizing much of everything we've known and thought we wanted all along is not really what we need. Much of the giving and taking we do in life is out of blind desperation to find something that is not attainable until we resolve the blind desperation and accept ourselves as we are, flaw and as beautiful as we want to be, for beauty is openness, gentleness, kindness, strength, security and ultimately, happiness.
Do not be fooled by the surface, the superficial visual definition of beauty accepted today, for it is as fleeting as it is a momentary snapshot of our culture only viewed through other people's eyes. Even in the physical world, it is viewed by just one of five senses. How we do not see the limited judgments of beauty we accept as a definition of what beautiful is can only be explained by a cultural blindness to true beauty. An unwillingness to use much more than a single physical sense, sight, to define one of the most important concepts in our culture.
The layers of delusion are thick with such self-deception. This moment I ponder but two of them, beauty and happiness, and I am sad that both are so misunderstood and misinterpreted by so many. My hope is that, by exploring these thoughts in these words, we may find some clarity and relief from the delusions and in this knowledge, find a smile that let's us know we are not alone, we are understood, and we have a rare moment of true happiness and beauty amidst the collective delusions of our culture.
hl,
ric
You are already a writer. :)
ReplyDelete:)
ReplyDeleteThanks :)