As of last week, I have been twenty three years in Finland. Next year, it will equate to half my life spent on the other side of the world from where I was born. I'd like to say it has all been a good experience, but nothing is all good and there have been, are, and will be many challenges to come. I think that overall I have done okay here, but in the last handful of years it has definitely been a backward step in many respects. Hopefully, things improve.
If only there were magic.
Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, magic doesn't exist. The things that we attribute to magic or some higher power, are just conditions that we don't yet understand. And the fact is, due to our limited nature and capabilities to understand, there is always going to more we don't know, no matter how much we learn. We are constrained creatures acting within a system that is forever larger than we are, can be, and could ever understand.
This isn't to say that we can't learn and improve, it is just that if we are banking on knowing as our solution, we might never know enough. For instance, when I was teaching business English a lot of clients felt that if they knew some more vocabulary, or improved their grammar a bit, then they would know enough to be confident when speaking. But it is a fallacy, because confidence isn't attached to what is known, often to the detriment of our behaviours.
I was having a conversation with a friend who has OCD and suffered from it for more than two decades. In the summer, they ran an ultra marathon through Finnish Lapland and while talking about their experiences, I enquired how the OCD was impacted. There was no OCD. Which is something I predicted before they set off on their run, because from a few other ultra runners I know, the brain gets overwhelmed with tiredness, hallucinations can happen, and the entire focus goes into one foot in front of the other. There is no brain power to think, to worry about irrelevant - it is just survival instinct. No thought of whether stove or oven is on, or if the door is locked.
What my friend has discovered in therapy, is that she doesn't process emotions well and instead converts them into understanding that makes sense. Knowledge. The problem is, their understanding of the situation isn't necessarily the truth of the matter, but it dictates their behaviours. Which makes sense, because our behaviours are actions - the end process of creation.
Thought, word, action.
But as we were talking I realised that the "thought" part of that equation isn't our conscious thought, but the thoughts that have arisen due to some emotional state. The conscious thought process are the words that we translate the emotion into, before we convince ourselves to act and therefore, create. And when we do this consistently, we create a belief.
All a belief is, is a thought we have repeated enough and created into a habit. And hence, we should be able to uncreate a belief or a habit, through changing the creative process, overpowering what we have known and replacing it with another creative process. And, while our feelings can create end actions, end actions made habitual can create new feelings. And then through repetition, those new feelings become familiar enough that they in turn generate new thoughts, new words, new actions.
I ended the first paragraph with "Hopefully, things improve", but hoping is like believing in magic, that somehow, without intervention, things will fall into place and work out. And yes, technically this is the case, but it doesn't mean that it is going to work out for the best. It all just works out, because that is how the universe operates, but that isn't how we as individuals experience our lives. We experience our lives as apart from the universe, even though we are inevitably trapped within it. We think, therefore we believe that we exist, and the more that we know, the stronger our beliefs are that what we are doing is right.
But is what we doing, right?
My friend logically "knows" that what they are doing is not actually rational, yet they are trapped in a cycle of knowing, without being able to alter their behaviour effectively. Do they not know enough? Perhaps. It is very possible that they don't know the right thing to know that will stop their compulsive behaviours. But, that "right thing" might not be at the conscious mental level - it could be in the physical knowledge base, or the emotional. If conscious knowing was enough, we would all be close to the best versions of ourselves, because we already know so many of the things we should do to improve. Yet, we aren't getting better, are we?
If I could click my fingers and create magic.
If I could click my fingers and become the best version of myself, would it be my thoughts that would change the most, or my behaviours? If I was the best version of myself, how would my feelings be affected? And if I were the best version of myself, how would my feelings, affect my conscious words and then my actions going forward into the future? Do I know what I should be doing?
Then why aren't I doing it?
If only there were magic.
Taraz
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