Hello, I’m back. I have to be honest since coming back from holiday with Dylan and Ross I’ve had a little bit of writers block. I am not making excuses for not blogging but I have found it really difficult to get back on track and focus on, well, most probably everything.
This was the first holiday I’d had in over a year after the closure of New U Coaching and although it was relaxing I don’t feel I have been fully able to shake off my ingrained tiredness and suppose battle weariness that I have accumulated over the last 2 years.
So I decided to give myself a good talking to, which I did in the mirror yesterday.
Others may think I’m mad and maybe I am slightly, but if you don’t give your self a good talking to every now and then, well, you may just end up pottering through your days, allowing yourself to be the victim of something that actually you can most probably control yourself, if only you’d put your mind to it.
After coming back from a very wet and tropical Mexico we arrived back to a very wet and damp Edinburgh. The rain thrashed against the windows, which put us off from venturing any further than the warmth of the sofa and the blanket that covered us. So we had movie night at home, watching American Beauty, the Kevin Spacy triumph.
I’ve seen this film many times before but last night it struck me, why are we always searching and wanting for more? I admit I'm just as bad as everyone else, caught up in the rat race of earning money, which we need, buying gadgets and all kinds of things to satisfy the emptiness that we have inside. The problem is, with living in this way, in this materialistic lifestyle, it tends to be short lived. A quick fix, like a addict we crave more and more and more until these bursts of frenzied spending and desire to climb up the social ladder begin to take over our lives.
I’m not saying that you or even I shouldn’t have nice things or desire to progress in our lives, what
I'm saying is that I believe we have a fundamental issue of not being able to appreciate what we have because we’re always looking for next fix, which will no doubt be bigger and better than the one before.
When in Mexico we went on a trip into the Mayan region of the country and we were exposed to how they live their lives. It was completely different to how we were living in Mexico, which comes as no surprise but what did surprise me, was how happy they seemed to be with what they had and how they lived.
Compared to those who live in cities, like most of us do, they’d be described as poor, deprived or even under privileged. However what we forget is that this civilisation gave us sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems as well monumental architecture and a developed written language way before any other civilisation known.
Maybe knowing where they came from and what they did for civilisation has taken them on a journey that brings contentment, satisfaction and an appreciation for why they exist in this world.
The character Lester Burnham in American Beauty as we know, goes on his own journey of self-discovery, only to find that he has everything he wants right in front of his eyes. He’d lost himself and so had his wife, both their journeys showing their need to search for other things to make them happy, without appreciating what they had created and made for themselves.
At the end of the movie, Lester Burnham admits he feels great; he had re-connected within himself and he began to start appreciating the more simple things in life. He sits down at the kitchen table and looks at an old family photograph of his wife, their daughter and himself, all are happy and content.
He smiles remembering how special the people are in the photograph and like most, when self-realisation creeps up on us, we can see clearly for the first time. The same thing happened for Lester, he begin to appreciate what he’d created and what was actually important to him.
For his character, however, it was too late to rectify the mess he and his wife had created for themselves, but for us maybe it’s not too late.
Maybe we can start to appreciate the things we have before we start anchoring for the things we don’t have. Perhaps we can even begin to appreciate why we exist in this world and what we can do to make it better not for just us but for other’s too.
But at the end of the day life is a journey and we can choose to navigate our path one way or the other. But perhaps, we just need to stop every now and again and appreciate the view?
