The world is so full of books and people suggesting us how to live, how to live better, or what did you learn from this or that about how to live? Even in a simple conversation, people insert useful advices about how to live. Not to mention highly considered writers and intellectuals, such as Mark Twain:
Mark Twain’s Top 8 Tips for Living A Good Life
- Approve of yourself. …
- Your limitations may just be in your mind. …
- Lighten up and have some fun. …
- Let go of anger. …
- Release yourself from entitlement. …
- If you’re taking a different path, prepare for reactions. …
- Keep your focus steadily on what you want. …
- Don’t focus so much on making yourself feel good.
One such typical example is to do with being optimistic, people advice a person in difficulty (and who isn’t, even from time to time) to be optimistic, only optimistic, and the other side immediately agrees; this is the right way to live a life, no doubt. God will help him if he doubts the optimistic view. And so, the right way to live a life is agreed by all, there are recopies full of clichés about the right way to live.
Another one is grandchildren, you (as a grandparent) must be crazy about them, this is important part of having a good life, no such insistence is given about loving one’s parents, it is important of course, but it is expressed without the pomp and ceremony that the grandchildren get.
Everyone also agrees that there is no one way for all to live their life, and any individual must choose his/her own path. Which by itself is a great contradiction, because no one lives his own life and the majority is following the way most people live their life; the good, decent citizen – life.
So it is quite a rigid recapie of how to live, and those who don’t accept the herd and collective language about how to live – turn to alternative ‘how to’ books, lectures, seminars, new age groups, vegans, the great religions, yoga, meditation, spiritual movements and more.
Why is it like that? What does it mean? Does it mean that we do not live right? Or that we do not know how to live? And if so, how come? Do animals know how to live their life?
So, is the life of the majority could be a technical disguise of their free time with which they don’t really know what to do with?
Is all this ‘how to live’ business a silent statement of the bankruptcy of human life?
Well it is the view of the writer of this essay that it is impossible to know how to live; life either happens to you or you are trying all the time to start it, or to sew it with patches. If it does not happen to you and upon you, you cannot operate it manually, mechanically. It is too complex. For example our kidney: it is impossible to operate it manually by mechanical instruction, it wouldn’t work, it happens. We don’t happen. Life which is not a happening is like bicycle operated by pedals, compared to bicycles operated by electricity.
We should be passive in our life, we should cease trying to push and direct them all the time, we should give up control, but then everyone is afraid that everything will fall apart, but no, if we give up control, stop trying to control our life- something higher and much more powerful will take over.
We are full of fear that if we stop pushing (trying to find and practice the right way to live), everything would collapse, this is because we don’t trust that the forces of creation will pick us up. And they will, if we let go. And then we will become part of the great flow and life will happen for us in us and through us, and we will need no more ‘how to’ books. When life is a happening for you – you don’t need to know how to live anymore.
Gabriel
