‘To learn anything, it takes 10.000 hours.’

‘There are only two human motivations: anger or fear.’

‘Addiction is for life.’

‘People are either introverts or extraverts.’

‘What goes around, comes around.’

‘It takes 66 days to change a habit.’

There are thousands and thousands and thousands of these ideas, these quotes, these rules, these, well, urban myths.

And every time I talk to a person it becomes clear how much we believe them and rely on them and take them as gospel.

But with all of these things, literally ALL of them, we don’t really know.

We don’t.

And we can’t.

(And we don’t even have to.)

Are anger and fear really the only motivations?

Do we ALL have traumas?

Are we either left-brain people or right-brain people?

Is it absolutely necessary to experience the dark night of the soul?

I call bullshit on everything.

All of it.

Why?

Because I don’t know.

And you don’t either.

Now there’s a big chance you’ve bought into many of these granite nuggets (which are just clumsy ways of chopping up the wholeness of life), but that doesn’t mean you can know they are true.

I am sure you believe many of them because most of us do.

You just KNOW them to be true because you assume they are.

We simply hear them and hear them again and then adopt them and they become part of how we look at the world and ourselves and others.

Our perception of life is absolutely filled to the brim with ideas we have learned to believe and countless second- or third-hand experiences.

That is not wrong by any means.

I totally get the practical value and I totally get our deep tendency and need to feel like we understand life, but it’s not the only way to live it.

The other way is the exact opposite.

Living in almost perfect not-knowing.

More and more I realize that I can only really talk from the experience I am having right now, and be inspired and informed by that.

Apart from the assumptions and the memories and the intellect and the things that trickled down from conversations with people of authority in my life, what is left?

What is here, now, besides what we THINK?

Can we even talk without whatever we borrowed from others, what we were told on millions of occasions, what we read or watched and remembered?

Can we be without the things we are not sure of, and just stay with the only thing that seems to be real, the experience of experience?

It’s a challenge, and you might find it a useless and overly lofty one.

But it’s something I am floating towards, whether I want it or not.

For years I have noticed that my assumptions are somehow losing their power, that I am not really interested in the rules and the quotes that we all seem to believe in and abide by, like almost all of the stuff that I have learned is gently taken away from me.

What is left?

Can I just be aware of whatever it is that is going on right now, and live and speak and behave from that place?

Can I rely on something that is purely experiential and direct instead of intellectual?

Can I really just be and be okay with that?

I guess I am willing to try.

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(Photo by @siora18, for Unsplash)