Do you sometimes feel that you are just going through the motions, existing instead of living? Are you doing the same things over and over again yet expecting different results, finding that over and over again nothing ever changes? Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Or, does it feel like the new normal?
Ask yourself; are you what and where you want to be? If not, do you know what and where you want to be? If so, how do you translate from what and where you are now to what and where you want to be? In other words, how do you transform yourself into the desired difference?
These are the questions I have struggled with many times during my life. I spent a great deal of time stumbling through life trying to do what was expected of me by others. As a young adult, I never fully explored my full potential. I played it safe for so long that I became accustomed to variations in sameness.
I rebelled and broke out of my state of variable sameness only once, by becoming an alcoholic. That didn’t work either. I became locked into the variations in sameness of my addiction. Wake up, promise myself I would not drink that day, drink myself into oblivion by that evening, get up and do it all over again the next day. Insanity!
I eventually became sober and so I was forced to begin to work on myself. I began to care for my mental and spiritual realms right away as part of my program of recovery, in order to stay sober. I addressed my physical and emotional realms much later but never to the same degree. But, I was at least headed in the right direction.
Somewhere along the line though, I stopped progressing. Oh, I stayed sober but I stopped developing as a human being. I never kept at improving myself beyond doing what was necessary to ensure my sobriety and to meet my responsibilities and obligations.
I stopped pursuing any course of action that could have taken me to the next level in my development. I became stagnant and stuck.
I slipped back into a life, no, an existence of variations in sameness. Everyday I went to work, did my job well, came home, was a good husband, earned money, bought stuff, got up the next day and did it all over again. All the while, I never felt my work to be a perfect fit for me. I was doing but I wasn’t creating.
Two years ago something happened. Something terrible that I thought I could not survive. It shook me to my foundation. I didn’t go back to drinking but that meant that I felt all of what I was going through. Every bit of it and it was all painfully and poetically toxic. I felt perfectly broken.
Things are much better now but because of what I went through, something changed. It wasn’t one moment of clarity or some kind of instant epiphany. No, it was a slow realization that life was trying to tell me something. I began to pay attention. It was time to break free of my variations in sameness.
I heard the message loud and clear – Clark it is time to learn, time to grow, time to aspire, time to explore, time to develop, time to give, time to transform, time to discover your true passion and purpose in life using the natural talents and abilities that you have been given.
This is now my mission in life today, tomorrow, day after day after day. I have traded variations in sameness for a permanence of change – a transformation.
Are you experiencing variations in sameness? Has something so devastating happened to you recently that you have begun to question your life and what you want from living? If so, maybe life is trying to tell you that it is time to change, time to transform.