What it means to be grown up for me

 

It took about 15 days to settle back into normal life. So I have time to contemplate on what I’ve learned and it all started with manure. Or the smell of it anyway.

When I was young and naive, everything was black and white. It either stinks or smells good. Pain is to be avoided at all cost and food tastes good or bad. A life of “either or”. What has been happening to my senses over the years is that the judgement part ceases to be important. Nothing is good or bad, black or white anymore. Instead I tend to dwell on what exactly is the composition of the smell or taste. The shades of light, what makes a person repulsive and how they arrived there. Just like when I smelled the manure and the thought wandered to how the smell doesn’t contain enough grass so the cows must be eating some corn based feed. The “How and what” have replaced the usual judgmental ego.

I am on a path to further enlightenment and there are more enlightenment that I need to understand and people at a higher plane of conscious than me. But I just want to look back on what it took to reach this place.

Change. Change plays the most important role. Without change, without meeting the unknown head on in order to experience change, I would not have been able to know that certain things we took for granted can be different. If I’ve stayed around in the same  place, I would never know that things can be different.

But the base that enabled me to move around and experience comes from being financially free and having no ties whatsoever in any country. Something I had not foreseen to be able to do this young and is usually only available to people during their pre-college leap year travels.

I thank my parents for uprooting me and leaving me here alone. This unchained me from any ties.

I give thanks to the tech collapse of y2k and the great financial crisis of 2008 for forcing me to be financially independent and giving me the chance to eventually be free.

There are still parts of me that I have to tackle. Such as my reluctance to lead and my unwillingness to compete against someone and go all out. These are related to a kindness in me. A fear to hurt because of empathy for others. I am working on being able to turn it off and replacing it with respect for the competitor. In someway, not going all out, is very disrespectful. But it is a mental thing and it is also an excuse for my fear of failure.