If You Feel You Don’t Exist...

     You essentially or functionally don’t when you are aggressive, passive-aggressive or apathetic, because all of those is an orientation to circumstance and not personal belief.

     Life is not relative to circumstance but to love and truth, and if the pressures of life, which are arbitrary force us to take a aggressive or passive-aggression stance against it or an apathetic stance with it, then we are like a train on rails that only offer two destinations, neither of which have anything to do with us.
     Freedom doesn’t exist when the only movements you are offered is going exactly North or exactly South, especially when all the temperate zones are found but moving East or West. The end result of going North or South is arriving in a frozen wasteland. Fighting circumstance offers one benefit and not fighting it offers another, but charting your own course means you get neither of the benefits and both of the resistances. If your push directly against circumstance then you will look strong, if you let it push you then you look selfless, easy-going or adaptable, but to Follow your heart and fight some fights in some ways and be pushed sometimes in some ways depending on what is in your heart which no one else can see, means you won’t look strong or selfless but lost.
     Who do you know that is unaffected by circumstance and boldly and happily follows their heart?
     What model do we have for living an authentic life?
     If the dream of living an authentic life seems like a mere fantasy, then those feelings in our heart will indefinitely stay unresolved and so they might as well not exist… right?
     If you feel like you don’t exist, that your life is puppeteered by circumstance, then the option to leave circumstance through death theoretically only chances one thing, circumstance.
     Since there is no human model of whether an authentic life is possible, I’ll use an analogy that I think illustrates the possibility of it:
     There is a difference between live music and recorded even if it is a high fidelity recording because Real sound is a perfect wave and digital music is a series of boxy 1’s and 0’s that mimic a wave. Whether it is possible to make those boxy 1’s and 0’s thin enough that the digital wave becomes a perfect wave might not be an answerable question. What is an answerable question is whether silence or a monotone noise is music?
     We aren’t born being able to sing, all we can do is grunt, sigh and cry. Just as we learn more and more words as we grow that can convey more than just a grunt of resistance, a sigh of relief or a cry of panic, we can learn more and more actions other than aggression, passive-aggression and apathy. The difference between the two processes is that each new word we learn affords us a measurable benefit, whereas each new action creates one more immediate resistance against it and possibly no noticeable benefit in the short or even long term. How many projects do we have in our lives that are left abandoned half finished? How much do those monuments of reasons not to try effect our motivation to actually think, feel and create when society offers us a certain set of benefits if we stop thinking, feeling and creating and just conform to the system?
     I don’t think all dreams have to be finished in order not to be a monument of self-doubt, but I think that the spark of each of those dreams can be found and put into a new dream that you care about enough to do what it takes to make it a reality.
     Those sparks are still alive, I don’t think they ever die. I think that when we identify what really the spark was and define the line between what was the spark and what was our assumption of how that spark would catch fire, we can build a dream more in line with the nature of the flame inside us and less in line with the pressure of circumstance.