When the normal instances, moments, gaps and unexpected scenarios don’t happen, there are still ways for life to change. When life feels like life has succumbed to routine, personal rituals and unpleasant consistency; there are stills ways of inflicting mind altering procedures. Ways to reinvent yourself; reinvent the mind which for some reason, seems to want to stick to what it knows. The first thought, with a statement like that, are drugs, or a long vacation, or attempting something so far off the confines of who you are, that for a brief moment you can surprise yourself in what you are capable of. But those types of changes; starting a garden, eating better, running everyday, are just simple twists in an already established life. For those of you who are content with that, congratulations: You have found who you are, whom you want to be, and what keeps you in a general state of happiness. But for those of you who crave a complete overhaul of life, a full redirection in every moral, in every habit, in every manner of thinking: I have bad news. You were raised this way. You experienced successes, failures and compromises that made you into this person you are now. All the shrinks, and all the self-help books in the world will only give you means to ignore the person inside. Learning through men and woman in suits and glasses how to un-do that person who made those bad choices you can’t live with. Giving you a way to see over whatever it is that plagues your daily ways. You learn to deal with the un-wanted self in the same way you would deal with a new prosthetic arm, or as a recovered alcoholic does; thinking every moment about that drink but learning not to have it. The roots of the problem lay with the direction from where you came. If you can’t accept yourself for who you are, then I am afraid you have only one alternative: reinvent the maturity from which you are based.
I’m not talking about putting on a new style of clothes, or find desirable outlooks on life from other people. You won’t graze the mind-set of the Dalai Lama by reading his book; you have to go live on a mountain. I’m talking about starting over; back before you were self-aware and every choice was made on instinct. Back when it was a revolutionary event to find that a lit burner was hot, or that dogs bite when teased. Start at maturity, and work your way up. But don’t start at your own maturity, obviously that didn’t work out the way you hoped. Start at the concepts of those you want to be, as well as those you don’t, and take in every fault and ill-fated incidence you believe they ever had.
Despite knowing that what we go through has been experienced, we feel hope, pain, and consolation in a way that always seems unique; and it is, to us as an individual. In the direction of life we take, the value of our choices, the way we treat others, the way we treat ourselves, even down to the bare essentials; we mature in time with eyes forward looking for the answer. It is in this that the classification of maturity is achieved: an ethically broad word that covers all of what makes a person defined and sound (or in a complete state of madness). But take away a man’s reasoning, his morals and his principles, and give him only time to better himself in an untainted environment, isolated from everything, then see his true plain self as he matures without pressure. The corruption of his culture’s influence, the rehabilitation from loss, the dream state effects of love, the value of ownership, and any and all manipulative effects are things that make the modern man. He then in turn makes the ones around him. The modern man changes surrounding lives by living amongst others seeking influence, trends and common answers for common questions. Take these things away and you are still left with a man who grows; still runs the course of zero to death, each year an unimaginable lesson without language or order of thoughts. Cultures effects on maturity seem to be put everything into a single balloon of experience, which lifts a man up from troglodyte adolescence, to quadruped teen-angst, to homosapien nine-to-five. Perhaps in the rulebook of a take-your-pick culture, this concept of growth works; ideas for a goal of how to best live a life beneficial to yourself, and how to give back to the economy of general happiness. These influecnes inspire growth in certain personality traits, negative and positive. Think of each trait in the modern mans maturity as a subject on a bar graph, rather than one balloon experience; one bar for morals, one for tolerance, religion, work ethics, balance of leisure time, love, hobbies, health, etc. But also bars of common negative traits; vices such as cigarettes and alcohol, womanizing, insomnia, bad driving, kleptomania, and any and all behaviors that while seemingly bad in the eyes of those around us, do equally make up unique a individual that some will hate, and others will love. All these bars lowering and rising each day as we go thought new and exciting experiences.
One day these bars stop moving, or only move slightly with unexpected events only absorbing into the person you are. As I said before, if you are happy when this day comes, more power to you. But if that day comes and the mean of all those experiences is unpleasant, then it is time to start over. But your graph is already made, and that leaves only the option of tinkering with its percentages, done by scrambling origins from where they first took effect.
Start by selecting an individual that’s equally plain as you. Learn to move and mimic the mannerisms of the cliché individual you want to be; the hand movements and the habits in reactions. But don’t spread you wants across many people, simply choose one for the moment and become them in both body and mind. Go back to where they learned to be the way they are; where they stole a popsicle and learned value, when they hit a car with their bike, their first embarrassing encounter with sex, or in a horribly altering event was struck in a moment of rage by their step-father, causing a sudden reliance on independence. Pool-side summers, painting fences for just a few dollars; all memories leading to the person with certain values that they are now.
Mimic the movements and choices from these experiences of the individual you chose, they don’t have to be historically correct, just what you believe brought them to maturity. An actor would call this “method”; where you gain insight into a character through living and intergrading themselves into background of the character they play, that won’t necessarily be on screen, but will make the performance that much more genuine as you act and react with a knowledge of their past guiding your way.
The difference is, you want to be this character. You want their good traits along with the bad. You want the levels of their bar graphs slightly inflicting your own.
When this done, find a new individual, and repeat the procedure. The goal here is not be somebody who already exists, but to find replacement levels for your own traits. These levels cannot be selected or chosen, just left to chance that some might stick. Move on to a new person every month, then every week, then every day. Finally at one point, you will realize in the blend of all these different hypothetical influences, you have forgotten who you originally were.
A child who watches hours of television a day will at some point remember how amazing the grass felt on the farm, despite having gown up in a suburb. Some children will remember that time at the beach with their family, having never seen the ocean. Non-existent dogs that died, favorite restaurants that never were; all things that eventually make up a person, despite never being their own experience.
So if your life isn’t the way you imagined, and your personality is the cage that keeps you in a uniform consistency: reinvent yourself. A harsh way of changing and equally risky because if done right, the possibility that you may end up as one of the bad personalities out there is a 50/50 chance, but as we all know, change is not always for the better. Every decision and experience is a roll of the dice of what that direction will make us, and how our graphs will fluctuate accordingly.
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