I believe that people were meant to be creative, committed, and independent within their lives. There’s no doubt in my mind that when people express themselves through some creative means or another and when they are dedicated to something positive, and can do those things through their own language and belief systems, there’s a really high likelihood that they will be happy people. When people live their lives through compliance and dependence, they’ll never see the need to be creative and express anything other than a skill for surviving.
To reclaim a creative, committed, and independent life, I strongly recommend that people start with a pen and paper. The reason is that evidence suggests that when someone starts to recognize the reasons and timings for their behaviors, they can alter them for the better. If a person remains stuck in an unaware life, he or she may never see just how dependent and compliant he or she is. Compliance, to me, means living through someone else’s will. To me, dependence is the natural extension of living a life compliant to someone else’s whim.
This compliance and dependence cycle is highly evident within an addiction. An addicted person lives his or her life at the whim of his or her substance of choice. It’s the substance that determines the addicted person’s actions; the dependence upon the substance ensures that the addicted person will never be wholly human. Rather, the addicted person lives to obtain and consume his or her substance and can never be anything other than an automaton caught in a rote pursuit of a substance.
But, to me, it’s not just the addicted person who needs to become aware of their behaviors. I think we all have something to learn and improve within our lives. The pen is the most important weapon against a life of drudgery and limited options. If we can gain literacy of the conditions our lives present, then we can begin to see them as limiting factors that can be overcome and improved. We can become creative, committed, and independent, first though, we have to know the “ABCs of Me.”
It can be frustrating to live at someone else whim. I think it’s better to write ourselves to the people we want to be.
