About desires and relationships

About desires and relationships.jpg
(7 July 2019)

We live in a world in which the social interactions receive enormous importance. Our entire life and identity depends on the people with whom we communicate, live and form relationships. With so many aspects of ourselves at stake, we should not be surprised if we find ourselves wanting to have close connections with resourceful people, to ensure both our security and prosperity. Nowadays, being resourceful can mean various things: being wealthy, being popular, being powerful, being intelligent, being sexually attractive, being wise etc.

Our current society seems to promote the idea that we should follow our desires and create the best life for ourselves. This will inevitably include creating or acquiring relationships that serve us. We seem to invest a lot of attention into love relationships, probably because they give us the strongest emotions and sense of importance. That makes us react more strongly to any event or story that happens around us and that involves a love relationship. We try to learn from them and decide our actions based on the experience of other people.

Sometimes, we come to the conclusion that it is better to remain alone or just postpone. Other times, we conclude that we must to do whatever it takes to achieve the relationship we desire. Whatever our decision is, once we believe it, our thought process changes in order to justify it. We take into consideration only or mostly the aspects that serve our purpose. Most often, we don’t even realize we are doing this. We use our emotions to guide us towards that purpose.

If we look inside ourselves, we can see that, whatever we do, we must be able to justify our actions and feel good about ourselves. We must feel that we have the right to be the way we are, regardless of how other people might perceive us. Sometimes, we have to build laborious stories about what happens to us and why we make specific decisions. We must believe our stories, even when the situation seems crazy. We must feel that our stories are justified. How we feel depends on how well our inner stories match the outer reality.

We observe the experience of other people, we judge them and we learn from them. This process of learning is a process in which we create or update our own stories, not just about other people, but also about ourselves. The more clearly we are able to understand this, the more accurate our stories will become. And that will bring us a peace of mind.

 

Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.

— Don Miguel Ruiz

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