Once in a while, it’s good to go soul searching. It can be good to poke around in the back of your head but you can also send yourself off-balance. Asking questions of yourself is an activity best kept for when you need it most, a bit like setting an SOS flare when you’re off-track.
The grounds for not asking too many questions of yourself, is it can lead to low-confidence and cognitive vulnerability. Keeping a sharp mind like a team of SAS soldiers is of vital importance for when you need it most, and you’ll thank yourself for doing so to stop it wandering into a forest of self-doubt.
It’s effortless to talk yourself down, but harder to talk yourself up. Yet these attitudes reverse when transitioning between teenager to young adulthood. The self-confidence we perspired oozed naturally, we knew what to do and we tackled life hard. But why is it so difficult to transfer this from pupae to butterfly level?
Maybe we have too much to lose. As adults, we sculpt ourselves into a statue of firm posture. And like a statue, our beliefs, behaviours, leanings, ideas become harder to reshape. The only thing we can do is grow suburban-esque flowers around the base of our stone feet covering the neglect we put ourselves through, possibly polishing a turd, not realising that beneath the stone we carved – we are.
Soul searching is another word for ‘feeling stuck’. And if you’re feeling stuck, you’ll need more than to just bumble around asking insignificant questions. Real soul searching comes at a price and feels like caffeine induced brain fog. Feeling stuck often results from lack of direction, frequently due to a subconsciously driven perceived loss of identity.
We try new things, sometimes refusing to try new things, starving ourselves of new pathways. Lack of identity can be sourced from repeating the same routine, banging our heads against the wall to empty it of treasure that isn’t there, panning for gold in a ghost town. This is the time to be reacquainted with oneself and repopulate it.
Going soul searching is for when you don’t know you, and you don’t want to do you, because you’ve had enough of you. A marked difference from identity. These are the times we feel stuck in a pillar of stone, like statues lay set for 400 years by our ancestors, when we feel like ancestors ourselves, unwilling to change something we know can be easily shaken.
There’s no need to soul search when our joints are lubricated, and our necks owl-like – instead we keep WD40’ing away! But ask deep questions with identity, then a compass is what we’ll need – to get out of that forest. We knew who we were and decided one day to unnecessarily challenge it in a quest to be satisfied with the incompatible, always wanting and needing more. Sometimes we don’t know our true selves but can feel it, taken by the notion of fitting in instead of fitting into ourselves. This is where we must stay and build, otherwise, we’ll lose it, and roll back into that statue quicker than medusa can say ‘pssst…over here’.
When all’s said and done, we’re a young species. In the history of the universe, we’re very primitive, possibly plankton for a universe teeming with life and unknown teeth. Primitive enough to ignore the consciousness of space, and enough to spend time focusing on the menial clutter of everyday politics and status. Unsuspectingly torturing ourselves without restraint. But no matter how much we mature, we can always count on the need to ask ‘why?’ and for more. It is our evolutionary catalyst. For the present and the future. But sometimes, happiness is wanting everything you have.
Stanisland Magazine 