I’ve been thinking about life a lot lately. Duh.
Anyways, here is what I realized a little better and I thought I would share. It’s what we have been discussing, but has crystallized more and more as I have continued thinking about it – and read a few books that brought out some of these ideas.
We are born with certain instincts. Much like salmons who know how to swim upstream to their home, or whatever other animal instinct that you are familiar with. Perhaps one of these instincts for us is to seek companionship or to prepare for the future.
For some reason, society doesn’t honor our true instincts, rather whatever society deems best for itself at any given time, based on whatever method society figures that out by.
The issue is that we look to society to tell us what is “normal” and when we look out and then in and see the incongruity, we get confused.
No one ever really thinks to tell us that what society says is normal, may not be normal at all, because, really, no one really gets that. Sure our role models might chime in that society is overly sexual or too Protestant, but on the more basic (and more important) areas of life, they never think to examine that there might be a difference between societal norms and their own – so they don’t point that out to us either.
So here is the issue for us, who are trying to be happy. Because there is a natural tendency (perhaps even instinctual) to look to society to establish our own norms, when societal norms are not in line with our own personal instincts we get “out of alignment”. Of course, if we are out of alignment, there is no way we can achieve self-acceptance since, we ourselves know intuitively, that we are not ourselves!
So self-alignment becomes the first step in the process of self-acceptance. This involves figuring out who you are, and comparing it to society, and seeing where you are DIFFERENT from society. Instinctively you probably already know this. However, you have probably gone around all your life saying to yourself that society is right and you are wrong. But remember, it is your world, so really, you are right, and society is wrong. (Assuming you have done your due diligence and you know that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you…)
These differences, are actually what makes you special and unique and while you intuitively probably knew that, you need to celebrate this fact, and clearly state it to yourself. In doing this, you are able to clearly separate yourself from society and self-align and become ready to move on to self-acceptance.