How My Stories Can Suck the Joy Out of Life

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I Like It!

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I’ve just spent half an hour trying to come up with an interesting title for this post. I’m not completely satisfied with the one above because you might see it as an admission that my writing is dangerously depressing – maybe it is, I hope not, but that’s not what I’m getting at here. The stories I’m referring to are the ones that buzz around inside of my noggin; my beliefs about how life is and how it should be. These stories behave like a virus by taking over my thinking, so that I mistake them for some type of truth. This means that when life causes my story to unravel, as it always does, I can feel like I’m under attack or that things are going wrong for me. It is only by understanding that these stories were never important that I can escape this unnecessary dissatisfaction.

How Stories about the Future Can Ruin the Present

The stories that cause me the most suffering are the ones about my future. These act like unexploded landmines just waiting for me on the road up ahead. My ability to predict the future is abysmal, but it is just so easy to be sucked into these stories. I develop these expectations and when they do not come to fruition I feel cheated and misled. Even when life is turning out better than planned, which is regularly the case, I can still feel let down because my story of how it should be is under threat. This sad situation becomes farcical when I realize that none of my stories have ever turned out to be true, yet I can still be suckered into believing them.

I like having goals, and it is probably important to have them, but getting too hung up on where I should be going in life is a recipe for disaster. The best things have all been unexpected, and they turned out to be far better than anything that existed in my stories. All these beliefs really do is get in the way of enjoying what is already here because they nag, nag, nag. These stories trigger a steady stream of bullshit thoughts that try to convince me that something is not right and that this isn’t how it should be. I doubt there are any thoughts more useless than the ones that involve “this is not how it should be”. Such thinking is useless because “should be” is just another way of saying “isn’t” – there is no “should be” because there only is what is. This is why I need to embrace the uncertainty of life and let go of any confidence I have in my fortune telling ability.