I believe one of the hardest things for people to do in life is explore deep inside themselves. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly it’s because it, well, it’s painful and it’s work. After all, wouldn’t it be easier just to coast through life on the surface where everything looks okay, especially on a sunny day?
I don’t know where I heard this– and it was related to swimming, but it also can be attributed to life– someone said that what’s really important is what happens below the surface. For swimming, that means your breathing, your strokes, your body movements. But in life it means what’s inside you, what’s happening in your soul, in the deepest depths of who you are and who you want to be.
And that’s where the most meaning of life is. While it’s great to have lots of social media likes (believe me, I don’t mind lots of likes because it’s then that I know that people are seeing and reading what I’m posting), it’s what’s inside ourselves where we find true meaning. But if we don’t allow ourselves to “go there” then we’ll never know that. Instead, we stay on the surface and continue to coast.
However, in that coasting, we also find that things don’t necessarily come together or work out. And we wonder why!
After my divorce, I bought a book by a therapist about how to move forward and find the man of your dreams sort of thing (I gave the book away and now have no idea what the author’s name or book title was). I was trying to figure out why I was attracting the wrong sort of man (lots of emotional unavailability there!) or not attracting men at all (unless they were my mom’s age– if you’ve never heard the story about what happened in the church parking lot after morning mass one day…).
I was in LA and had driven south to Huntington Beach for some surfing. After I was done, I decided to take the book to the beach and read for a while. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what the book told me, but at first I was thought, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me.
What finally admitted to myself was that DID apply to me and the sooner I admitted it and figured it out, the better off I would be. But it was my resistance from reaching deep inside of me that was keeping me from finding deeper meaning and from truly moving forward.
It’s uncomfortable to reach inside ourselves, to walk a rocky, uknown road. But it’s well worth the journey when you see the view from the other side.