When Did We Start Believing There’s a Right Way to Live?

At what point did we decide we had to choose a career, a city, a home, a routine, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to make it all work?

I didn’t start thinking about these things because I had the answers. Quite the opposite. I started asking these questions because, after being hit by a car, I was given a second chance at life, and I realized that the answers I had once given myself were no longer enough.

How much of your life have you spent without truly living? How much time have you spent on autopilot, doing what you were programmed to do or what was expected of you?

How many days have you wasted feeling unhappy because you were in that place, that job, or that relationship? How many times has your body tried to tell you something, showing you day after day that the choices you were making were slowly consuming you from the inside out, making you physically and mentally unwell?And how many times have you refused to listen, or failed to realize that, perhaps, it wasn’t something external doing this to you, but you yourself?

Maybe we aren’t even aware that we’re not living the life we truly want. We blindly follow the recipe we’re handed as children, sticking to it religiously. Not a pinch of salt or sugar out of place.

Without questioning it, we use the same measurements, the same ingredients, and bake the same cake, with the same flavor and texture as everyone else. Everything is the same. And yet, we forget that we are all unique, and there is no magic formula that works for everyone.

Actually, I think that sometimes it’s good to get the measurements wrong and add a new ingredient. That’s when something new and unique begins to take shape, something with your signature on it, something made by your soul. If you grew up watching Cartoon Network, you might remember this is how The Powerpuff Girls were born: Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X to the mixture.

And what would our own Chemical X be?

Unlike in the cartoon, it’s something that already exists within you. It’s the part of you that keeps shouting, asking you to listen, and to be brave enough to go out and live.

Your Chemical X is your essence. It’s what makes you the unique and special person you are. It’s what transforms whatever you choose to focus your energy and dedication on into something wonderfully original and authentic.

It took me 29 years to understand that the people on this planet, whether young or old, don’t have the formula for life. Because that formula doesn’t exist. It took me 29 years to understand that we are born completely free to do whatever we want with this short amount of time we have here, the time we call life.

I believe we are nothing more than particles of dust, existing temporarily in this vast universe. Our importance here is probably MUCH smaller than we are led to believe. We are like stars: we are born, we shine, we play our part in this immense darkness, and then we die. And if that is true, are we shining our own truths as brightly and powerfully as we can? Or are we wasting the miracle of being alive?

Someone I deeply admire recently decided not to continue with chemotherapy after coming to terms with the fact that he was dying. In several videos online, Pepe Mujica talks about how life is about more than just working. He argues that we need to leave room for the wild ideas and dreams inside our heads, and that we are only truly free when we spend time doing things that inspire us, things we care about, things we pursue with passion and purpose.

In one of the videos that stayed with me the most, he says:

We consume an absurd amount of things we will never use, polluting the planet without stopping to question it. In an attempt to entertain our bored souls, we continue following a manufactured and unsustainable way of life. A system that makes us believe we need to accumulate thousands of pieces of paper with invented values, placing us on higher or lower rungs of the social ladder.

Often, anyone who tries to step out of the rat race is called crazy. But for that reason, among many others, I find myself asking: who are the truly crazy people in this world?

To understand how I got here, carrying all these questions with me, I need to go back a little and tell you how my car accident not only saved me, but also gave me a second chance at a life full of adventure.

...And this story continues in the next post!

A kiss from Mawô! :)