One Apple A Day #385
What do you do when your inner world and the outer world go in opposite directions?
Your inner world is the sum of your values, your principles, your —conscious and unconscious— beliefs that inform your words, actions and behaviours.
The outer world is the reality out there or at least your experience of the reality out there that you are living in a specific moment.
It is your family, your work, the people stuck in the traffic around you, that store, your community, your country.
We all walk in the space in-between these two worlds. Sometimes the distance between them is so vast that we feel stretched.
Every day, we face this dilemma.
What should we do?
Follow our inner world at the risk of finding ourselves disconnected from the outer world? Is it even an option? Will it still be a life?
Or maybe we can surrender to the outer world. Mould ourselves around its values, principles and beliefs. It would make us survive, but at which price? What would be of our identity?
Most of us opt for a compromise. We walk on a thin line that makes us feel we are not giving up who we are and at the same time we are blending in with the reality. The problem of compromises is that they are about giving up something.
We renounce to some of our principles in exchange for a better connection with the world. But that feeling of giving up something remains.
My challenge these days is to do something different.
Instead of compromising, I synthesise.
I don’t want to give up something to find peace. I want to get the best of everything to find bliss.
How do I do that?
I don’t have the perfect recipe.
I’m still trying and making mistakes.
But I’ve learned two practices that are working so far.
The first is simple mantra I repeat myself when I feel stretched in that tension.
Stay, listen, trust.
We don’t have to always do something. We don’t have to say something. Learning to stay and listen with trust, help us to tune in with the world. It’s about finding a way to keep playing your music creating harmony with the rest of the world.
The second practice is to always look for the questions. At the level of the answers, the tension can seem too broad to deal with. But if you go deeper and seek the questions behind those answers you may find that the distance is a lot smaller than you think.