Stuck In A Rut

Do you ever wake up and feel like your life is like groundhog day? That everything you do is routine and the pleasure has been sucked out of life. There’s responsibilities, mouths to feed, people to look after, spontaneity has long gone out of your life. Do you long for those days when you were carefree and life was fun and joyous?
When you get to a certain age you get to a place where you become a robot , the responsibilities of life weigh you down, your dreams seem long in the past , things you thought possible are no longer. There’s more important things to worry about bills to pay, rubbish to take out , plumbing to fix, the list goes on. When was it that life became one long chore, when did it become running around trying to achieve a million things but still feeling like a failure?
I think somewhere along the way we all forgot why we are here and that joy is our god given right.
We got lost in the life’s detail and forgot the bigger picture. Society has a big part to play in this, from a young age you are encouraged to make something of yourself , to study hard at a sensible reliable profession , one that will hold you in good stead for the future. You are taught how to behave , how to carry yourself, each and every day your natural being is sapped away little by little by what society expectations. If you try to deviate you will be looked down on , you maybe made an outcast, your family may disown you , love will be withheld. Who wants to grow up without love and approval so what do we all do? We conform. One day way in the future we wake up to a life that we never wanted and cannot possibly imagine how ended up where we did. Some of us console ourselves, it’s not that terrible, we have weekends and holidays to enjoy. I just need to get through the day and the next day then it will be Friday , we basically wish most of our lives away. The very life that we have worked so hard to create , the very life that we were told by teachers, parents that will bring us happiness and joy. I am not saying that we are all living a miserable life , what I am saying there only a few ‘lucky people’ who do what they want in life and truly jump out of bed looking forward to the day ahead. It makes me sad that this is the expectation and no the norm. Although I believe life should include suffering and that is how you grow but what I am talking about is inertia.
A life which is not bad , not great but ok. We make do , we accept all that is fed to us, there are a few exceptions to the rule who rebel or who get paid to do what they love, the rest of us are lost in a quagmire of materialism . I think that we are so far gone down this road some us don’t even realise it. We fill the emptiness and the boredom with more and more things , things that we have to then work for to pay for , hence spiralling further and further into a self made prison . At the least it’s a comfortable prison with pillows from an expensive place, the best shag pile rug, the best wine. All of these are momentary pleasures. Do you know when you first buy something , say a car , it gives you pleasure for the first two weeks , three weeks , some maybe a year and then after that a better model comes out and suddenly you tire of this one . You then begin to chase after the new model , you may have to work a little harder to buy it but it’s worth it , then a year later a new model comes out and so it goes on. Too many of us get stuck in the rat race to feed our need for bigger, better newer things. The very things that are meant to make our life easier are the very things that seem to trap us.
How to break out of this prison, first and foremost you have to recognise that true content comes from within, a content that cannot be rocked by outside events, no doubt they will be events that sadden you such a death of a loved one but I am talking about deep content that is reliant on just being . How is this achieved you may ask?
Well , you need to take time out to examine who you are what you are about , you need to go deep within yourself to search for the answers, we are here to learn and to achieve , we all have a mission of some sort , we are all on a path of development. One needs to mediate to go into himself /herself and really know what it is to be alive. To see the beauty in everything we see and everything wedo , in each breath we take, each flower we see, each smile we observe, every sunset, every raindrop. We need to stop and see the beauty all around us, we need to revel in the majestic world that god has provided us with. We need to ultimately look in the mirror into our eyes and see the beauty that resides each and every of us and fall in love with not just our selves but with life itself.