If you don’t think about it, life is just life.

Stuff happens, you have a body and dreams and fears, and you try to make the best out of it before you die.

Sometimes you like what’s going on, and sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you try to change stuff, and sometimes you don’t, or it seems you can’t, or you just don’t feel like it.

But no matter what, there seems to be a world you live in.

Pretty obvious and straightforward.

Although it isn’t.

Not even a bit.

At all.

Every time I talk to people about life and their lives and stuff they like and dislike, I also ask them if they realize that every single person on the planet has a different experience of what’s going on.

Most people get that pretty easily, but it’s just that they mostly don’t really think about it.

So, yeah, sure, and so what?

The idea that we constantly and only live in our unique, personal creations and what that COULD mean if you think about it some more, doesn’t really excite most human beings, it doesn’t really open up any doors and windows and gates to freedom.

They simply want their circumstances to change.

Exactly like we’ve been taught, exactly how we believe life works.

But here’s the thing: there’s not really such a thing as ‘life’.

We’re not walking around in one life that we all share.

There’s not really a single stage we all share.

There’s only our personal perception of this event.

There’s our childishly, stupidly limited idea of it.

There’s our exclusive, narrowest of narrow experience of it.

And that’s really immersive, but it’s not Life.

It’s a version, a version that seems solid enough for the person who’s involved in it, but that’s wobbly as fuck.

When we don’t think a lot, life seems to be simple.

When we totally overthink, life is incredibly difficult and complicated (see a pattern there?).

And in any case, in every second, with every breath, it’s a uniquely tailored experience around a uniquely created story.

We can’t look around and see life.

We can’t understand life, ever.

And we most certainly can’t really understand other people, because they’re all living their own, separate, uniquely shaped, incredibly isolated lives.

It’s beyond amazing that this works so well.

That we can see all around us that other people don’t agree with our world, and we STILL don’t see why that really is.

That we can wake up in the morning feeling like we’re living under a dark rock, only to feel relieved and happy an hour later.

It’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool, THIS, including the confusion we always find a logical reason for, the crazy differences, the changes we go through on a daily basis, and the preferences that collide with the stuff that other people want.

And the idea that we’re walking around in a world that we can grasp and control and change, tops it off.

We can see examples of how deeply we’re NOT getting life all day long, but that still doesn’t really matter.

Solutions for the inconsistencies are in place.

Ways to smooth it out are available.

Convenient forgetfulness delivers the blank spots.

All part of the deal.

I’m sitting here at the kitchen table, watching the apparent Norwegian sky, and it’s all so real, so obvious, so… lifelike.

How could this not be what it seems to be?

That’s a miracle.

It is.

Just maybe not in your world.

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(Photo by @tobiastu, for Unsplash)