Belief Makers

Welcome to Belief Makers, the world's most active blog and online community focused on the Option philosophy and becoming happier.

Belief Makers offers a wide range of ideas, insights and perspectives that we hope you will find interesting, inspiring, enjoyable and challenging.

We welcome your insights, questions, suggestions, assertions and musings.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

My life is all bridges !

posted by Mark Kaufman

One of my favorite tidbits of "Mark's-ist" philosophy is "The path to my future is brightly lit by the bridges I have left burning behind me!" I think there's a powerful forward facing energy in the way Mark has re-tooled an old concept for a growth oriented use.
Sigh -- here I sit looking at my life and ruminating on the dichotomy between the many blessings in my life and the subtle under-current of malaise that occasionally dilutes whatever joy I produce. Then I realized what's been bothering me (what I've been doing to bother myself?). My life is all bridges. Over the past two years I have spent oodles of time reflecting on my life and examining how I've put it together and what can be done to restructure it in a way that puts more of an emphasis on being happy and living a joyful existence filled with and fueled by love. Sounds great! Yes, there is a but. But as I have added new interests, new motivations, new friends, new loves I have always sought to bring my pre-existing life and loves forward with me to the promised land. So while I have been busy mapping out a new life for myself I have insisted on maintaining and nourishing my old life as well.

As I sit and ponder, I find that I feel I am living many lives simultaneously and they are not at all well integrated. An incomplete list of my many parallel lives/relationships goes something like this:
  • My Son (from my 1st marriage)
  • My Daughter (from my current marriage)
  • My Wife
  • My Friends, many and various
  • My Family of Birth
  • Special Friend 1
  • Special Friend 2
  • Special Friend 3
  • Myself - taking time to take care of myself and have me time
  • My ex-wife in dealing with issues around my son
  • a few more, you get the idea

And so it goes. Now, under other, more committed to happiness circumstances, I would describe myself as living a rich life filled with people who love me and feel loved by me. This would totally work for me EXCEPT that I have chosen to erect a complicated compartmental structure that keeps various of the people in my life away from others. Don't forget to add to that the fact that to keep such a structure in place requires a deep and abiding commitment to inauthenticity.As a result, I feel that I am constantly running across one bridge to one life, spending some time there, and then scurrying across another bridge to another life and spending some time there and never feeling like I am living a complete life anywhere.

Now, this is the time in a Belief Makers blog that one usually expects the author to share some great revelation, insight, or the excavation of a key belief that, when changed, makes all the difference. Even invite the reader to follow their path and try on some new belief. Well, no such luck here. As I have somewhat become the patron saint of how NOT to live an Option life I'm afraid at this point you find me lost in the woods with no clear idea or plan of how to get out into the open. If we learn from our mistakes, I am getting a first class education here.

Still looking for something uplifting here at the end? Well, what are you looking at me for? Your happiness is yours to make, go on ahead and do it!

Love always,

Mark

Labels: , , , ,


posted by Mark Kaufman  # 12:00 AM
Comments:
Mark K, it occurs to me that when our bridges are built on inauthenticity they tend to effect continental drift making them longer and longer, i.e., the bridge as a divisive tool. Perhaps your occasional sense of malaise could simply exhaustion from having to run so far...

Also, a couple of other essentials of Mark's-ist philosophy (or was it Lennon), corollaries so to speak...
1. Don't burn your bridges before you cross them, and, (just in case it wasn't clear)
2. Don't burn your bridges while you're on them
# posted by Blogger Teflon : March 4, 2010 8:12 AM
 
Thanks for the stimuli Mark K~~the way Edward DeBono profoundly speaks to the uselessness of "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda came up for me, and how oftenly in our relationships we can be distracted and confused by those in our circle, in our dialogue with them. Sometimes we feel (think) conflictedly, as if we 'must' abide by anothers thinking/values~~~ otherwise we are in someway disrespecting them or our relationship with them......Thusly we get ourselves immeshed in a huge relationship juggling act, and sense an inauthenticity disconnect, with who we are ourselves.....Quite a Matrix or Labrynith scenario to be explored, Yes?~~~

...been there done that, Larry (and still doing that, lol)

How often are we invited to 'dance,' with them, when all we really want to hear and do, is dance and move to our own music?

How often is it simply a version of fear, that others insist that we not be ourselves in our dealings with other partners in our pond?
# posted by Blogger benevolentwarrior : March 7, 2010 9:11 AM
 
Is your life full of bridges or if it more thoughts than actions?

Mark T talks about "burning bridges BEHIND..."

I see you as someone who knows all your brigdes very well, but you seem to watch them rather than cross them. Do you want to burn a bridge infront of you? go back the same road you've been, but see it with new eyes (havne't you done that a few times with diets?)

Big hug

Joy
# posted by Blogger Joy : March 7, 2010 1:38 PM
 

Post a Comment





<< Home

Comments

Add to Google Account

Add to Google

To view the schedule
for upcoming articles
Click Here.

Blog Authors

Archives


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to
Posts [Atom]