Essentially you do not have to read any of the books about other people who have found a recipe to solve their life puzzle. You do not have to listen to me either. All you need  to work out things in your life is yourself. All the answers about what is right or wrong to you, are already there within you. But for some reason you have not had time or wish to listen. Or other insecure people around you have confused you and your parents have told you things about life which have puzzled you and taken away your self-confidence. So at the time when the answers to your questions floated up from your subconscsiousness, you pressed them back. And by doing this you actually were disrespectful to yourself. Like we all are. Oftentimes.

Respect is a tricky things. Even though we all crave for it and expect it from others, we do not give it back. We lack respect at home as parents, at work as employees or managers and at school or at home as children. How often have you really treated ourself and others with respect? Think about all those times when you felt sorry for yourself. Think about all those times when you felt that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those where the times which were the outcome of lack of respect to your own real needs. And only you know why you neglected them in the first place and ended up in this mess.

Only you can change your own life. But in order to change you have to start listening to yourself. And not just that. The crux is that you have to dare. When you finally have picked up the message which your body or mind have desperately been trying to convey you (stop worrying, do not eat this food, give yoursef a stretch after a long day behind the computer, etc), you have to take action too. But if you are of a careful and contemplative type, it may seem that making compromises with your conscience is actually better than making a radical decision to change.  It is good to lie to yourself, you may think. It keeps you in the comfortable range of already familiar suffering. Human body and mind are capable of lying and telling you that yes, the formula works even when it sucks. All for the sake of survival. Which comes at a cost, though. Like everything in life.

So, what I am saying is that being honest to oneself can sometmes go against our nature although we believe the opposite. But it is an illusion. We were never biologically constucted to die in the arms of a pray  who we had been incapable of outsmarting. We developed our big brains and they have both the dark and the light side. The light side is that we have autonomous nervous system – while I am writing this, my brain is engaged in letting my fingers work, to relax and contract multiple muscles at the same time and adjust against the gravitational pull so that the intended typing gets done.

Autonomous nerve system controls many of our bodily functions – digesting, blinking, heartbeat just to name a few. We would be utterly occupied with orienting in the maze of our bodily needs without the peripheral nervous system. But our bodies ares not constructed to tell us the truth – this is never the idea – our bodies usually tell us what is the most beneficial thing to do in order to survive. And without blinking an eye, we will opt for being dishonest even in the part of the mind which we control voluntarily. Because cheating will give us a competitive edge. Which brings us to the dark side – the voluntary nervous system which unfortunately does not work as efficiently when it comes to linking the survival instinct with complicate daily routines and interactions. As soon as we let our volition to rule, as soon as we are damn sure that we know, we are very close to losing the balance. Nature’s constructions are not intended to be perfect. We have a very limited capability to protect ourselves from acting irrationable.

So. How do solve your life puzzle? Stay rationable when your mind tricks you to to being irrationable, lose balance when your body is making an effort to keep homeostasis, and fight against the flight-and-fight instinct when it is not the matter of life and death but just a prosaic moment from an ordinady day at work.

There is no secret recepe. I have none. There is no punchline. Please start reading again from the beginning.

Kairi