If and when …

• if I get that thing … I will have reached my goal and I’ll be happy
• when I get this part in that movie … everyone will think more of me
• if I become a millionaire … people will think I am smart
• when I get plastic surgery … people will think I am more beautiful
• if I hang with those people …. others will think I’m cool

Just ‘being’ ourselves is an increasingly difficult thing for people to do. It requires practise in the face of resistance; the world, it’s layers of complexity and distraction are all the while dragging us onto one path or another. Arriving at an understanding that we are infinitely ‘more’ than the masks we wear, is a difficult task in this noisy world we inhabit. Perhaps such an understanding, in a way, represents the archetypal ‘path less travelled’. 

When we step away from that ‘yapping’ voice in our head that directs our attentions and actions, when we step back from that and ‘observe’ it; it then occurs to us that the part of us that ‘observes’, may be a step closer to our ‘actual’ self. The natural question arises then of course, can that ‘more real’ self - be observed in turn? And on it goes … the journey inward can be both confounding and revealing - as a similar journey in an outward direction. 

When we look outward, we can observe nature; and realise that we, stand here as an integral part of it. But we are not just a part of nature. In fact, we are not just a part of the universe. In a way, and this is true for each of us, the entire universe conspires at any given moment to ‘form’ the state of ‘being’ that is, us. We are so much smaller than our ego might suggest but so much larger than we can easily imagine. We are, much, much more important - and wonderful - than the ‘ifs’ and ‘whens’ we constantly conjure forth.