By Nevena Martinović
Each of us wants to be successful. But do we really? In fact, most of us have been instructed from the earliest childhood to exist in order to be successful, recognized and happy, that we here to create and to justify all those expectations that are directed at us, all those dreams that we awakened and encouraged from the first days of our existence, to completely and unconsciously validate that the love and care directed towards us will make sense all the time and that not everything is in vain or meaningless. And so we, pure energies, completely unaware of the context, an open heart and mind, facing what stands in front of us, even in childhood pick up and adopt the key principles according to which our life is unfolding and directed in the earliest period of our existence. Unconsciously, we live someone else’s ambition, destiny, desires, dreams, expectations and rules. We give the most beautiful part of ourselves to others and let them make waves of us like the wind does with this ocean called life. Then, if we are lucky, these waves will shake us so much, transfer us from one end of the world to the other, until we become so skilled that, in the end, we will create our own pace and direction.
Together with them, we will create a circle, then we will go around it a few more times and every time we do that, we will make the waves bigger, fresher, more dangerous and gentler. We will be better acquainted with their composition, what they react to, what moves them, how they calm down, when they disappear, when they are quiet and how to recognize that they are coming back again. We will meet many people on these waves, some will be especially pleasant for us, with some we will like to dive more into the ocean, with others to surf more, some we will pretend we have never met, and some we will just swim away. And every wave, every a drop of that water will bring us back to us, where it all started, why they directed us like that, what we needed to know and who we really are. It will bring us back to the beginning and the energy we had then, to beings with an open heart and open mind. But this time, the beginning will be different. We are no longer unconscious. This time we know that the waves are weaved by our thoughts, that they are made up of them and show the purity of the water from which they are woven. This time we will know that the height we can reach depends on how open our heart is and how deep we can go into our own being and all its depths. This is the beginning of our conscious life. And the wind is there to push us to repeat another round.
But let’s go back to the beginning…
What if I get what I want? In order to know what we want, we must know why we want something or someone at all, what draws us to that desire, what it will fulfill, which part of us, what it will bring us and why it is so important to us. Then questions start to pile up, we start to complicate things and it happens that we often, unplanned go into the depths of our being with this one wish. In the end, it turns out that we, as humans, have very few desires, or more precisely, that we have almost none. When we reach to ourselves in the truest sense of the word, we realize that this is a place where desire does not exist. And then we look at things from a different angle, we replace the word “desire” with the word “purpose”. We begin to approach things and people not as something we need to reach, conquer or appropriate to satisfy ourselves, but we start from the meaning that someone or something has for us and how he or she contributes to us being better, all of us.
We get to know our human side, the one that nurtures our being and makes us unique in the whole system. It is not great desires that unite us with a better version of us, but the nurturing of our personality, our inner child, acceptance and non-resistance. A beautiful word, a beautiful thought, a beautiful gesture, a beautiful book, beautiful music and beautiful relationships are things that steer us forward, that transform us, open new doors for us and expand our knowledge and horizons. These are not desires, it is a meaning in itself.
In a society that promotes and imposes desires, it is difficult to reach oneself and discover that meaning. In the end, desires indeed move us, but fulfilling them does not guarantee us satisfaction, happiness and peace. That is why the way we fulfill our desires is also important.