Slaves to how we look at the world
A sentence I believe I will never stop hearing is: that's just how I am; or: I know that's how it's done; or again: that's how I learned to do it, I've done it this way all my life.
I've been behind these sentences too; I hid behind them for years, even justifying the parts of me that were surely not right. Well, I want to tell you that I haven't changed, I've improved. The work I have done and am doing is surely smoothing the rough edges, taking good examples and growing new visions.
This can't happen within a standard way of living, you may be wondering, but let me tell you that it is precisely in the standard you are in that you can change everything. If you look at what you have around you, you surely see it on yourself. I'm talking about the kind of clothes others wear and that you now wear. About the language others use and that you use in the same way. I wonder, how much of yourself do you see in others? Have you ever influenced someone, noticing they have the same way of doing things as you? If you've seen it, that's great, you're already ahead in a change; you just need to understand the destination you've chosen to reach. Wherever it takes you, know that it will be an example for the future.
Many aim for goals: money, a career, a nice house and a nice car, but how much value do material goods really have?
Of all the dear people who have lived around you, what do you have left of them? Material goods or the value of a life. I already know that whoever got to enjoy the material goods of someone who passed away got from those goods only more worries added to their own. Whoever carries the memory, instead, also carries the example of something that I know has freed you from worries.
Don't worry, I don't mean you shouldn't enjoy life, have a career, earn money, buy your nice house and a beautiful car, but I am certainly telling you to take a good look at the world turning around you. I'm sure some things discourage you, I'm sure other things attract you. So enjoying life is indeed a gift, but in the same way it is a path to victory. A life that says "start here and finish there" makes no sense. It makes no sense, as if I told you your life is a trip from Trentino to Calabria, after which you'll be dead. Probably, already knowing the road and aware of death, I think you'd make the trip at ten kilometres an hour to enjoy everything you can.
In 2021 it isn't like that. You're born, you hate your parents (most of the time also because divorce is always around the corner), you curse life because you didn't want to be brought into the world, but then a desire for redemption comes and you start looking at the singer who succeeds through his failures, the leader who executes everyone out of his thirst for revenge against life, but all of them (as in so many examples of life) all of them, in their own way, become destructive examples in our lives. All we do is absorb and lash out in the same way, and we become victims and executioners. So we start driving at two hundred and no longer stop to look at the things we're passing through. And so our trip from Trentino to Calabria ends in two days at most, leaving nothing but a few material goods full of worries.
I still haven't learned to live life, because I keep making mistakes, and other mistakes are waiting around the corner just to trip me up. One thing is certain: by believing differently, I live a different life; by finding the right example, I try to pass on the right example. How much I manage to pass it on, I don't know, but I have slowed that trip from Trentino to Calabria a great deal to enjoy what has been given to me. A fantastic life, a fantastic land, and everything that has tried until now to make me run towards death I have pushed away; all those tricks of life are clear by now, and all that's left for me is to look calmly and with pleasure at the most beautiful things that have been Created around me.
Enjoy life, but start believing in the One who gave life to all this. There is One, and only One, who can be the explanation of the direction in life you can choose in order to live fully.
Enjoy discovering the life, the way and the truth.
Inspired by the verse:
Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.