Rational is not the final word.
Realizing that you are going through a specific situation challenging your apparent stability, testing yourself, or making you wonder if you’re acting according to how you perceive yourself, is the first step in getting a clue or a starting point to navigate it effectively. As many people say, when they approach to rehab, “acceptance is the first step”.
By “going through,” I’d like to express that it’s mostly when you’ve been repeating a behavior that’s not fulfilling whatever you’d like to be. For example, you start a diet to lose 5 pounds, but you’ve been binge eating the whole week, making you feel swollen and even more uncomfortable with yourself than before you started.
While some people may approach problem-solving by following a logical progression from point A to B and then C, life doesn’t always conform to such a simple formula. Life’s not an ABC to sing.
Recently, I’ve been contemplating how easily we perceive and analyze others’ situations as if it were effortless to step into their shoes and solve their problems with ease. However, when it comes to our own lives, our situations often seem complex, mysterious, and filled with challenges we strive to overcome daily. When it comes to my own individual circumstances, this rational thinking doesn’t always apply, and I find myself questioning why that is. Could it be a way to make life more interesting? Or am I just missing something?
That said, I guess that achieving something is not the result of ABC thinking or acting. Perhaps it’s a path to discover astonishing revelations or breathtaking illumination about ourselves and deeply understand our life experiences. It may involve embracing uncertainty and hoping for serendipitous moments or adopting a resilient mindset to continue persevering, letting the dice roll, hoping for magic in your hands to get your desired game, or a solid mindset to keep playing.
You see, we are used to narrating stories or measuring progress through a linear lens. However, true understanding or breakthrough, ever-lasting changes often emerge only when we have overcome the situation, and we are ready to articulate what transpired. This is when the patterns or scattered behavior turns into the bigger picture we can see; making sense of our non-linear experiences and sharing them becomes a means of finding closure ready to be seen as a complete masterpiece or a rational event worth sharing at our dinner table. We’re the only ones who know that this rational, linear story doesn’t mean it comes solely from rationality. Our confidence muscle becomes strong because now we know that we shouldn’t demand strict rationality from our experiences and outcomes when the very essence of this “art of living” encompasses chaos, creativity, and the ebb and flow of life’s ups and downs we’re able to thrive.
All I’m trying to say is that rational is not the final word or the ultimate answer we seek to understand whatever is going on in our lives, for starters. Rational is the outcome we desire just to make sense of ourselves.
