What Kind of Life is Worth Living?
Jun 3rd, 2009 by Joel
How do you react when you hear that question?
Do you stop, look within, and think about who you want to be, and what you want out of life?
Or do you get defensive, expecting another self-proclaimed expert to tell you how to fix your life?
My life’s not perfect.
I’d like to find/strengthen, or develop new abilities, and do things that seem out of reach.
I want to experience new possibilities in myself, so the world remains new and fresh around me.
There are endless books and methods of personal development that tell us what to become, and how to move along a path from where we are to where we want to be.
A few books are focused on giving us a new vision of life.
These books show us that who we are, what we’re capable of, and the way that we and the world live, is only one possibility among many.
Such books inspire us to rethink what is possible for ourselves, and the world.
I received a copy of a book like this recently, called A Life Worth Living, by Bill Giruzzi.
Typical for me, I try to get an overview of the book before I sit down to read it.
I look at the covers, the introduction, and the table of contents:
- Work is a Cultural Phenomenon
- It’s All Made Up
- Building Blocks
- Paradigm of Business
- Is this It?
- Someday the sun will go out
- The Curtain, Please
- The New Paradigm
- Not of this World
- Meet Your Narrator
- The future
- A New Mind, A New World
- The Edge of Language
- A Life Worth Living
It’s a small book.
And it doesn’t take long to read it.
But the issues that Bill raises, and the questions he asks us at the end of each chapter will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
I Don’t Know How to Create
The world we face is a result of people not wanting enough
One of the topics that Bill focuses on is our belief that we don’t know how to shape our lives.
There’s this subtle conversation in the background of our minds humming along saying something like, “There must be something wrong with me. If there weren’t something wrong with me, I wouldn’t have this life. ”
We create our lives with the choices that we make.
But we’re often unhappy with the results, so we deny our ability to create.
Why do we deny our lives?
Sometimes it’s because we can’t predict the consequences of our choices, and we’re unhappy with the way we feel about the life we’ve chosen.
We can’t understand how we got to this point.
What’s wrong with us?
How do we fix it?
We often pretend that we live and choose, unbound by any of the influences around us.
But Bill explains that we live and choose within a paradigm.
Our time, our culture, our parents, our life experiences, and beliefs tell us what is possible and appropriate.
The paradigm tells us what the choices us, and forces us to choose between only them.
Whose thoughts do I think?
Whose feelings do I feel?
Are they truly mine, or have I just borrowed them from the world around me?
A paradigm is a structure that binds us and limits us as much as the shape and size of a room that we stand in.
Changing the Paradigm
We’ve settled for what the past tells us is possible and as a result, we continue to be stuck surviving in the world we’ve created.
Whenever you think that you are tired with life as it is, change from the viewpoint that “this is life” to “this is life within this design”
We pretend that there is only one way that the world can be.
We pretend that our beliefs are as solid as the ground beneath us, and the sun in the sky.
But nothing in our lives is permanent.
Bill encourages us to think about our own death, the death of our loved ones, and the end of the earth and sun.
We realize that we treat so many things as permanent and inevitable, even though they can change tomorrow.
We accept the rules and thoughts that everyone lives by, and we assume that we have to fix our problems within this paradigm.
But many of our problems are simply a consequence of the paradigm we live in.
There’s another way.
We can adopt a new paradigm, a new way of thinking, with different rules, different choices, and different results.
Bill says:
I wrote this book to instill in you a desire for discovery…It’s about regaining what has been lost to us – the experience of powerfully and fully participating in our lives.
But how do we find a new way, when we have so much negativity toward our current life?
Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs, letting their lives slip away in pain, always waiting for another time and place to find meaning and satisfaction.
Our pain gives rise to our negativity.
We deny and resist our life.
Our resistance is directed toward our current life and the paradigm that our life is built on.
But we can’t imagine anything outside of that paradigm, so any thoughts of a new life are faced with the same resistance.
Living in Two Worlds
When we want to change, we don’t deny our present life.
We don’t quit our jobs, or ignore the urgent demands of our current world.
But we begin to create another structure.
We build another paradigm which can allow us to live differently, and make different choices.
We want to develop a way of life where it’s natural to experience joy, and find meaning and satisfaction every day.
The great challenge is to be aware of both paradigms, and yet keep them separate.
We have to learn to think and feel in two worlds:
- The world we are in, which derives from the past.
- And the world we want to create, which will derive from our actions, derived from our thoughts.
We’re not talking of a purely intellectual awareness of the new world we want to build, and the new paradigm that structures it.
This new world has to be placed in our hearts, and shine with possibility and meaning.
Robert Fritz, in Creating, and other books, speaks of something similar.
When we want to create, we have to hold at once in our minds, both our current reality, as well as the future to be created.
Each must be clear and distinct.
And we must care deeply about what we’re trying to create.
The contrast between the two worlds gives birth to a powerful energy, a creative tension that drives us to find a way to bring that future to life.
