What Rules a Life

There seem to be two external things that rule our lives, appointments and responsibilities.  Then there is the crisis imposed situation with which must be dealt.  Think about it and everything else is internal and that's another essay.

An appointment can be defined as a commitment to meet someone, for a specific reason, at a specified time and place.  These include seeing the doctor for a physical examination, doing an audition, attending rehearsal and performing, attending class, and on and on.  We usually manage these with a calendar or date book of some kind to remind us to be there and then.

Responsibilities are those tasks that must be carried out to meet obligations to others or complying with laws, regulations, and rules that are set forth by various outside entities.  The simplest of these is putting the trash and garbage out for pick up on a certain day of the week.  Even getting to the bus/ train stop on time for the ride counts as a responsibility and there are myriad others from filing and paying Federal and State taxes annually, renewing licenses on time, paying the bills, managing the cash.

 The boundaries of our lives are appointments and responsibilities, we either set them, agree to them, or they are enforced upon us and we accept them.  In any event we participate at some level in defining them.  This holds true for all of the appointments and responsibilities that we have.

Then there is all the time that is not taken up with these two categories and that, my friends, is life.   We are free to do whatever we would like for the time that we are not keeping an appointment or meeting a responsibility.

My wander through the wilderness didn't necessarily teach me this at the time but I am realizing it now that I am back to every day living.  There is a difficulty in deciding just how to spend this time in between; there are the cop-outs of TV, radio, electronic device games and interactions.  Then there are the ToDo lists that many of us make.  Then there's the nap but we even wake up from it eventually.

When I moved to Houston and was learning my way around and about the city and the territory, I devised a weekly planning method that evolved over the years into elaborate plotting and scheming for what to do next to reach certain aims.  This is fun but totally unnecessary.

I have come to the conclusion that one must have a dream and from that point on simply do whatever, including taking steps towards it.  "A dream is a wish your heart makes," and the lyrics go on with basic truths about dreams.  The dream is like setting your destination as Paris, committing to it and then; oops there's the Eiffel Tower!

With a dream, all of our personae work for the attainment of it.  Detailed planning is not necessary because within the depths of our being there are many of us who can pick up on the slightest clue as to how to get there.  A statement made by another is taken to heart; a billboard, or TV commercial strikes a chord, a book or paper suddenly comes alive with an idea.  Our whole being is sensitive to attaining the dream.

There are still hurdles to go over.  The biggest is certain of us who would do something else and, because we have free will, which is another way of saying we can be distracted, we do something other than move towards our dream or we reject the hint that we are given.

But that hint is not forgotten, the one persona who was sensitive of it does not forget it.  It remains there in the background for when the right opportunity arises for it to be brought to the fore.

Collectively we know so much more than of what we are aware at any instant.  Each and every one of our multitude of personae are always on the alert even if the director doesn't have them in the driver's seat at the moment.  They see, hear, touch, taste, and feel everything that is sensible, they intuit that which is not, they reason out the way to go, and make it available to the being.  All that needs doing is to do it.

This is easy to say but not easy to accomplish.  We are the remnants of all that has happened to us and much of what we do is to satisfy needs that were unmet in the past, or impressed on us by outside influences.  These combine to distract us from reaching our dreams because they take away the time to do that which will allow us to reach our dream.

Examining how we spend the in between times will give us a clue to the distractions, the outside influences, that forestall the fulfillment of our dreams.  Once found and dispelled we can move smartly on to realizing our dream.

During these times, we are governed by a set of rules by which we have decided to live.  At first they are imposed upon us and as we mature we either accept or reject them, more or less one by one.  Some rules may lay in the background for years without surfacing, others are invoked frequently as we live through each day.

Recognizing and thinking about the rules that govern us is worth the time and trouble.  Deciding which are distractions and which are bona fide rules is important and we even do this without much analysis.  Living up to some of them may be wasting precious lifetime.