How to “control our life in the right way”.
Most of us want to find our way in life… the right way. Not the righteous one, but the one that feels like the way we should be taking.
So why does going the right way still feel like something is missing?
You’re a good student. A high performer. You’ve walked the logical path—step by step—toward your own version of success and righteousness. But why does it still feel like something’s… off?
Have you found yourself trying to control everything, to follow the right path? Pick the right college, and then choose the right major. The right job. Find the right partner. The right car. Buy the right house. Make sure that everyone important in our lives thinks well of us. We want no bad opinions. We want everything to follow the “rules”—our rules. No matter if they don’t match the societal rules, these are the rules we feel comfortable around. They are constructed with reason. They are familiar. And if we follow them, maybe we’ll be fine. Safe.
But that brings me to a deeper question: why do I feel the need to live in a way that simply feels “right” to me? What even is “the right way”? Is it the version of “right” that my father tried to teach me? Or the one my mother instilled in me? They are my parents, after all. Their voices still echo in me. Or is the right way the one that society says I should follow? My teachers? My surroundings?
Or should I follow the “right” that I feel internally? But what if that keeps changing? What if some of these “rights” are outdated and no longer serve me—but I still cling to them out of loyalty or fear? And what if I am dead wrong about my right?
Can anyone tell me what the right way is – that’s what I was thinking in my late 20-s
Why do I keep returning to the complexity of trying to first understand what the right way is and then to doing that right things? Why don’t I let myself be simple? Why do I keep confusing myself—and others—with my attempts at small, abstract transformations? AM I expecting that if I do it in a specific, so-called, right thing, something magical – even righter – will happen to me? I pass the test? I will be rewarded?
And then it hit me…
We are too absorbed by doing the life the right way. I realized how seriously we all take this Matrix game. We’ve become so absorbed in “doing life” that we’ve started living it like a performance. I catch myself taking things far too seriously. I’ve grown attached to a certain identity—a mask I wear. And I wonder… Why?
Sometimes, we spend our whole lives trying to understand this “right thing”. Until we finally get it, there is no right thing…
INSERT LAST SCENE OF PLEASANTVILLE
David’s Mom: “When your father was here, I used to think,
‘This was it. This is the way it was always going to be. I had the right house. I had the right car. I had the right life.’”
David: “There is no right house. There is no right car.”
David’s Mom: “How’d you get so smart all of a sudden?”
INSERT LAST SCENE OF PLEASANTVILLE
Maybe the real “right” thing is: to understand that life isn’t about right or wrong. It just is. It’s a mosaic of contradictions. It holds love and hate, joy and pain, loss and victory, laughter and tears. And love, too—always love. So maybe the right thing is to just try to be driven by it. By love. Sure, this is not going to be always possible, sometimes we need to be driven by other things, too.
And maybe the right way isn’t something to find or prove—maybe it’s simply to live honestly, authentically, and with as much love as we can muster. Not perfect, not always clear, just real.
And maybe not even look for the right way.
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