Attraversiamo !
Dear authentic readers,
After more than a year of rest and relaxation from an obsessive mind, but for the sake of a weak heart, I decided to post this piece that I started writing a really long time ago.
[ Song suggestion to play while reading attached HERE ]
It’s really important and safe to say that I am not writing as an expert on these matters but rather as a nonstop learner, explorer, and storyteller committed to being the most real version of herself.
So anything that I share is purely relative and based on personal experiences.
For this particular letter, I wanted to talk about LIFE and MY conclusion about its definition, worth, and how to live it right.
My close friends know that I have been obsessed with this question “ What is life for you?”
And yes, it has always been a question that I ask to understand people’s personalities and how best to help them in our shared journeys. But still, it was also because I was in a quest to understand life myself and a way for me to approach it from different perspectives.
And after meeting a lot of people, from different ages,lifestyles, beliefs, and cultures. I have now decided that this quest will end now. Not because I have found the answers to my initial questions, but because the journey to get them gave me the RIGHT answers.
So if you’re: a teenager that is leaving their home for the first time, or a college student/graduate that is slowly passing to adulthood, or a person who’s about to make a major life decision, please re/consider the points that I am about to share to make your passage a little bit easier.
There is no standard definition for LIFE
Defining life is a tricky business!
Many factors impact how we see the world and how we fit in it: our family’s history, culture, friends, teachers, beliefs, social class, and most importantly, our subconscious and how it impacts how we experience and process all these layers of our existence.
Therefore, life can never have one standard definition. And trying to convince someone with yours or trying to live up to someone else’s definition: IS A WASTE OF TIME.
Now you might wonder, how can I know that the life I am living is based on my definition or someone else’s ?
The act of questioning that, is itself, the first thought I would recommend to start with. You might want to examine next:
- Who makes the hardest and most crucial decisions in your life, is it you or someone else ?
- Who sets your own goals (either short or long term ones)? Is it you or someone else ?
- If you do make your own decisions, and set your own goals, you might seriously want to examine who/what influences them ? Is it what YOU see will fit you the most, or is it what you see will fit OTHERS the most ?
Reflexions like these made me more mindful of every action and decision I make. And I’ve never been more happier.
Life keeps changing, and so does its meaning to us, so once in a while, a good and honest REALITY CHECK with oneself is needed to stay true to our values and identity.
Balance is everything
My pursuit of finding balance started when I realized that I am an extremist.
I feel everything, too much and too hard, and I always have been either too eager for life, or not enjoying my existence at all.
Living this way has made me who I am, so I will always be grateful for this trait. However, it has been also draining, tiring and sometimes soul sucking.
Therefore trying to have a balanced life became a necessity for me to stay sane.
I came across this saying while watching my comfort go-to movie when lost, “Eat, Pray, Love”:
Ketut Layur, a Medicine man in Bali, told Liz -the author and the main character of the book/movie, that “To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on earth that it’s like you have four legs instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”
I have been trying to figure out how to reach that for a couple of years now, and I can’t say I am there yet. However, for anyone embarking on a wellness journey that is based on balance, please keep in mind that balance, just like life itself, is defined differently from a person to another. And it takes deep inner work to find our right formula.
Stay grounded and take it easy
When I started writing this letter, my initial goal was to write about the beliefs that I really live by, and the ones that I wanted to explore out of desperation and hunger for change.
So I wrote down, as the third belief, “ Don’t move forward in life with EXTRA baggage”, and my mind literally froze.
I didn’t know how that feels or what to write about it for months. I have never experienced going through life without bagagge, and I don’t know anyone who has.
But as I extremely craved closure with everything in my life, I never considered that it’s a very complicated task, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it maybe should happen with someone who is not stained with that same baggage that I am carrying; So in the back of my mind, there has been, for a really long time, a little annoying notification that is always reminding me of all the unresolved issues I still have.
One day, I decided to share this thought with a friend, and it took her one second to reply: “ Salma, you can’t pause your whole life to get rid of your baggage. Nobody can do that all at once. All we can do is go through life, and get rid of small pieces here and there. Besides,It’s a process that takes a lifetime, because as long as we’re alive, new baggage always adds up.”
And just like that, all my worries concerning this matter faded away.
I realized that once again, in the midst of all my desires and aspirations, I confused my dreams and my reality. And in this particular situation, all I remembered is what ketut said “You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs instead of two.”
Reaching any goal is a challenge, but changing our lifestyle by destroying our limiting beliefs and toxic habits is a MISSION.
And every mission should be grounded by facts and driven by realistic goals.
Being ALIVE is the right way to live life
As my own Ketut said ( bestie you know yourself ), we can’t just pause our life to be okay, and then resume it when we’re done with our healing. I know and believe in that right now, but at the same time, I still want to revolutionize my life.
I’ll give myself some credit. I have come a long way in this revolution so far. The pandemic made me realize that I wasn’t living, I was just surviving each day on its own, while prioritizing what’s best for everyone over what’s best for me.
And I am not gonna lie, selflessness is something I will always embody and admire in other people, but abusing it is not a smart move.
Once serving others comes in the way of your sanity and peace of mind, just know that you’re doing it wrong.
Eventually, I have learned that, If you really believe in something, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that you’re ALIVE for it.
Being alive for me is not only a physical condition, it is more than that.
It’s being able to sleep and wake up everyday without a struggle, being able to do everyday’s chores without feeling like it’s a burden. It’s being able to recognize, accept and enjoy the blessings I have in this life.
Being alive is being able to love wholeheartedly my life and the people around me through thick and thin.
Life is tough, and no one can deny that. But whenever it gets hard, I just take a look around, and I realize how blessed I already am.
Life is not always about the hardships, it is also meant for love, little pleasures, peace, and happiness. Things that we cannot experience if we dwell on our struggles for too long.
My life changed drastically, once I heard in a podcast that we can learn from joy as much as we can learn from pain.
So when you have the choice, please choose to be happy, sane, healthy, and most importantly grateful for where you are at.
But if you can’t choose ( which is also a relatable state of mind), or you’re at least trying to, please remember that you are the most important person in your life, and just like we always expect our loved ones to ask for our help, we should ask for it when we’re at rock bottom too.
After all, we are all vulnerable creatures that need each other to live, either we admit it or not.
Not everyone is meant to stay in our life forever
One of the hardest parts of changing our life is losing touch with people. And I am not talking about the ones that one SHOULD lose touch with (that’s another topic), I am talking about the people you love immensely, but throughout the course of growing in different directions you end up losing them, because somehow life makes it hard to nurture all your relationships equally.
I have been the type that used to think that keeping people is easy, since I have managed to keep a lot of old friendships for a really long time, but the more I got busy with my own growth and its challenges, it became impossible to keep up with everyone outside of my tight inner circle.
Switching from a student to a full time working adult, comes with a lot of new and overwhelming responsibilities, but most importantly, it comes with less free time to socialize and keep up with your old habits.
It became very evident to me right now that not everyone we meet and connect with will be in our lives forever, and it is okay.
Life goes on, and so should we.
So the only thing we can do is to keep each other in our prayers, and be grateful we crossed paths at some point of our lives.
Realizing and understanding these facts are not only the rites of passage to adulthood but to any kind of change in one’s life.
You might have the same or different ones, but what matters is to always be compassionate enough with ourselves and to keep our past learnings with us when we’re going through a big shift and starting a new life either suddenly or by our free will.
If you reached this far in this letter and got what I mean by these words, all I can say now is :
