"You
know,
people
will give up anything - their jobs, their
money,
their
families,
their
health
- to
get it,
anything except the one and only thing you have to give up in order to
get it:
the conviction that you haven't
got it."
...
"You don't change the system. You
create
a
new
model that makes the old model obsolete."
I've
created
a
new
model within which I live
my life
- or
(spoken
more
rigorously)
I've
created
a
new
model for living
my life.
And even as I
say
that, I realize it's not entirely
true
- the
"created"
aspect of it, that is. What's
closer
to
the truth
is this: the model within which I live
my lifehas shifted. It's in allowing the model to shift
and in embracing its shift, that I've tantamount to
created
a
new
one.
Either
way,
the model in which I live
my lifenow
ie my model for living
my life,
is
new.
In the old model in which I lived, I did whatever I did in order to
be fulfilled
- in other words, an important criterion for
choosing
whether to do something / anything or not, was it had to
be fulfilling.
Without doing
fulfilling
things, I wouldn't
be fulfilled.
That's what I
knew
about
Life.
That was the smart thing to
know
about
Life.
And if whatever I did wasn't
fulfilling,
I changed it, or did more of it (hoping doing more of it
would make it
fulfilling),
or dropped it entirely and went on to something
new
/ different. And I
knew
that's
the way
it was, and that was
the way
it had to be. I had
Life
pretty much sussed out. Quelle naïveté!
There's a
view
(an ungrounded
view,
in my
opinion)
that some
artists
subscribe to - I myself have subscribed to it in
the past,
but I no longer do. It's that
being
unfulfilled inspires
creativity
- as if to
say
we're
driven
to
createin order to fill the void, "the void"
being
a metaphor for
being
unfulfilled. A corollary of this error (and I assert it is an error) is
concluding that
being fulfilled
leaves one with
nothing
to aspire to. This leads to
fulfillmentbeingparadoxicallyeschewed
even though in theory at least, we prize it greatly. I've divested my
stake in both that
view
as well as in its corollary. The two aren't joined at the hip. You can
be unfulfilled or not and yet still be
creative
(or not). Linking them together
creates
a
falsecausality
which is not only erroneous: it also drastically restricts what's
possible.
In my old model of
being
unfulfilled, then aspiring to
fulfillment
by
choosingfulfilling
things, my
choices
were colored by that model. In my
new
model of first
being fulfilled,
my
choices
are also colored by the model. The take-away is:
being fulfilled
does not herald the end of
choice.
Choice
is ever-present. What shifts is the scope and quality of
choices
made when
being fulfilled
is already fait accompli. It brings an entirely
new,
wide open raft of
possibilities
which weren't available before. It's an entirely
newway
of living life which in many
ways,
is waaay less complicated. It's simplistically
minimalistic. It's very
beautiful.
And it's very
Zen.
With the
new
model, we
choosecoming from
fulfillment
instead of in order to
be fulfilled.
Though the
new
model makes the old one obsolete, with both we still
get
to
choose.