Do you ever have those days where you do things you know you shouldn't, then end up regretting them before the day is over and berating yourself in a mentally masochistic manner that is completely useless in helping the situation? Welcome to the club. Do I do this often? No, but once in awhile is once too often for me. I am not going to tell you the details of this story, only that it involves a girl and that I should not have been involved in the first place. Ahh guilt. Ahh lust. Ahh punishing ourselves through remorse in order to somehow feel better. Ridiculous logic but it seems to work well with our backwards human psychology. So what's it all about? Why do we enter situations we know are harmful to our overall well being? Obviously some people could handle the same events with less reaction. You might angrily yell at a loved one and be completely guilt free throughout the day, or you might run over a squirrel and simply chuckle.
So the gravity of these occurrences is relative to be sure. What gets me is that we all must know intuitively the things that will leave a negative imprint on the old psyche, and yet we sometimes do these things anyway- maybe we do them often. I've frequently had this feeling that there is a right way to live for each of us, a way of orchestrating our lives so that we maximize our potential and do all the things we know we should do, like exercise, write letters, pay mom a visit, get up early, stop bad habits. So I feel like there are a bunch of things I know deep down I want to do on a daily basis with my life, and if i were to do these things I would be empowered and energetic and feeling successful and happy, because I got down to my core desires and made them happen despite my inherent laziness. In the same day, if I were to avoid all the activities that I know prevent me from achieving - activities like watching TV or eating junk food - then I would be one step closer to that feeling of success. Should one day be a microcosm for how we would like to live a life? It seems like if I imagined the perfect life for me, with praise and making people happy and lots of love, and then I tried to achieve it in one day (because tomorrow I might be dead), I would be getting the most out of each day instead of squandering them watching reruns or munching on crap. I would live unselfishly instead of selfishly. I would be energized by giving freely and working hard, laughing hard.
The problem is that we don't do this. We don't treat a day as if it were a life. We don't live as if this moment were our last. Yeah I guess some people would want to drive cars off cliffs in that case, or shoot guns in crowded malls, but most of us want to leave feeling we have given something to the world or made someone happy. We're too focused on gratifying our own desires and working the self-induced stress out of our systems. We don't have time or energy to figure out what would really make each day better. So we sit complacently in tired routines. But what if we started to change? What if we change this day? And what if we built momentum toward living our core beliefs? We have to imagine how life would be different, how it would improve, how much weight we would start losing and how many more books we would read, smiles we would give.
I'm not saying I can fully do this yet, or even get close to living a bunch of successively perfect days. But I can imagine what it would feel like. Feels pretty good...
