ROLE OF THOUGHTS AND NARRATIVES IN OUR LIFE
There’s no singular definition to a thought. It’s multi-dimensional but we all know that thoughts play crucial roles in shaping up the narratives we tell in our lives. The narratives create the story of our life, these stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves impact who we are and where we are headed in life.
The quality of our life depends upon the quality of our thoughts. Thoughts are powerful, when wisely used they can help us pave paths to our destiny. If humans were aware of how powerful their thoughts can be, I am very sure they would have been very conscious about how they think of what they think and how they create the narratives in their lives.
So, when life is headed in the wrong direction or a clueless path, we need to pause at the moment, be self-reflective and understand our thoughts and present life situations. In the end, the reality is our thoughts become things. Things? I mean our reality, the 3D world we create and live in.
Our thoughts also determine our sense of self. The way we think serves the other person to analyse our personality traits.
If somebody wants to transform their lives, the first step they need to take is to understand their thought process and the narratives they create through those thoughts.
Two statements used to confuse me a lot. They are “our thoughts create our world” and “the world creates our thoughts”. What’s true?
Well, both are true.
In most the situations, the stories which structure our lives are not written by us, but that’s the task given to us, what we do with what we are given is dependent on our thoughts and narratives to those situations. In short, we have to create something beautiful from that existing story given to us. This existing story has different humans (family, friends or any other important people), different events (our family conditioning, personal/social circumstances) to determine the plot of life and our role in it.
To make what I said easy, let me give an example: If a child is born into a healthy, well-functioning family, if he had good role models and supportive people and if he was fortunate enough to avoid any unusual cruel twist of life, then he is likely to adopt an empowering life narrative. But not everyone is born like that and fortunate enough.
Most of the world is traumatic, families carry generational trauma and then they pass it on to their next generation. Merely being born into a dysfunctional family and being subject to too much ridicule, experiencing too much trauma or tragedy early in life, can lead an individual to adopt a dark life narrative. Such people come to play the role of the victim or failure.
If that one person in a family, is self-conscious enough and has a positive mindset, he can break generational trauma and create a healthy tribe of the future generation. It just takes one person to do that. For that he needs to find the meaning in the dark, he needs to have a positive outlook to his situations.
History holds the biographies of legends who’s been through very bad life experiences, they grew up from nothing and they shaped their life beautifully by reinforcing positive outlook and creating redemptive narratives.
Many people find it hard to change their narrative, they play helpless, they become victims because they believe that their life is based on the collection of past events. They are socially conditioned beings. Most of the world is like that.
True!
If you actively look at every country, culture. People are restricted to their social conditioning, their religion, traditions, generationally passed down outlook to life.
One should fight back to change that outdated outlook which makes them victim to their circumstances and with that negative narrative, they believe it’s all written in destiny!
But what I understood through my life is there’s nothing that exists like pre-determined destiny.
I believe, that “I am the creator of my existence”.
Today what I feel is I am a soul in this body which serves as a vehicle to my existence through which the script of my life unfolds.
This is my narrative to life. I create every path that I walk, I create experiences, I learn lessons. Some experiences are pleasant and some are not so pleasant.
The world works on duality. Both light and dark should exist for a good balance and substance. The learning and acceptance come from suffering because nobody teaches us in the early stages of life that we can have unpleasant experiences in life and the outlook to those experiences should always be positive. That’s how meaning is created to our life. Well, with this better understanding of life, we can change what we teach to our future generations.
Every meaningful story has unpleasant chapters. We all should see our life as a movie as If we are the directors. This path to creating a beautiful story of life can only be achieved when we become “creators of our existence”.
The reason we have this capability is that our life story is more similar to an artistic creation than to an accurate depiction of reality. It is blending of fact and fiction, of both objective and subjective components.
For example, The objective components consist of the events of our life, our relationships, and our inborn imperfections and gifts. This is the material from which we create our story. But the finished product is not just formed from the existing material, along with this material of objective components, we mix in the subjective component of certain meanings and value judgements of ourselves. And this subjective part of our story is ours to control. Our thoughts which create our outlook & our narratives play a major role in creating the subjective part of our story.
Most people, however, spend their entire life accepting the judgements of other people. In other words, the subjective meaning to their life is determined by whether they are sticking to a certain family or social standards. Living life as a mediocre. If the outside world views them well, then they attribute a positive subjective meaning to their life, if they look down on them, or ridicule their actions, then their life story takes a darker turn. What is lacking here? Roleplay of self-narration to situations. Everybody just wishes to escape from this trap.
If we are bold enough to wish to escape from a narrative that is holding us in the grips of mediocrity, we need to take control of the subjective meaning of our life. We need to realize that there are many angles to interpret our life events and know that alternative perspectives doubtlessly exist, which would be far more beneficial to our well-being. When we realize that we can change the subjective component of our story, this realization leads to re-interpretation of the meaning and significance of past events and so re-write our history.
As we begin to apply a more active control over the subjective component of our life story. The perspective through which we view the world and our role in it will change. New possibilities will open before us as we realize that we are not chained to any single life role no matter how long we have played the part.
But who should we become with this new-found freedom? We can become anything and also, we can become ourselves.
When I say we can become anything, It doesn’t mean we’ll live a life without meaning and live for momentary pleasures. What I mean is, we can explore every option available in the world and use our abilities to work on them, new job, learning a new skill or anything. Make bounds of income with our potentials and skills. We can play any role that’s available in the world. But the satisfaction won’t last forever.
So, to achieve never-ending joy. We need to become ourselves. Everybody has that “why?” stuck in their beings.
This question: What’s my purpose? How will I find my calling?
The only path to finding the purpose is accepting ourselves as we are and trusting the unknown, having faith in it. What’s the unknown? It’s our soul or that voice which keeps guiding us.
If we deeply look into our life’s patterns, life incidents, our thoughts, our personality, understand our inner gifts, passion, our values and our imagination. We will find our life’s purpose. We will find the interconnectedness to every situation and deeper meaning to everything. All the life incidents are like bread crumbs thrown by the universe to find our calling.
This narrative of “finding the calling” is from my personal experience, this is how I found mine.
I found a deep resonance. I did stumble across words, meanings, incidents from situations and people. Everything reminded me of what I always knew. Everything brought me to my deepest truth. It was all about connecting dots and connecting me with long lost pieces of my soul.
Then I found my life’s purpose.
Now when found, this calling keeps us so passionate about the journey of life, it makes us feel restless and awake and this deep substance always pushes us to work until we see the results and with this passion, we keep finding an immense amount of joy and satisfaction enough for this lifetime.
