Artificial Life
The Grasshopper was up bright and early this morning and nudged me out of bed with this: “When you live in your head, your life is dead.”
I needed a bit of time to process this offering until it became clear. How often do we attempt to explain our life rather than live our life?
It’s the explaining that sucks the juice out of life. Simply put, we talk ourselves out of life.
Alfred Korzybski‘s famous line came to mind: “The map is not the territory” followed by its more modern day cousin: “The menu is not the food.”
Explaining your life is like trying to get sustenance from the tasty looking pancakes on the menu cover, only to get a mouthful of plastic and cardboard.
Living in your head isn’t real. It’s an attempt to create real rather than feel.
Real life can be felt; a life that’s dead can only be talked about.
Constantly planning your life is a full time job that doesn’t pay a salary. Have you ever noticed that life doesn’t go according to plan? Any effective teacher will tell you that the syllabus they worked on all summer goes out the window before the first week of fall classes is over. They have to adapt to life. The ones that don’t have a teaching style deader than Latin.
When you attempt to live life in your head, it’s as though you’re on a never ending search for an artificial sweetener rather than tasting the sweetness of life.
Life is spontaneous; living your life in your head is attempting to create spontaneity. That’s about as effective as faking sincerity.
Head dwellers are caught up in the notion that life should be a certain way and when it doesn’t match up, they do some more planning – planning a life that never gets lived, only thought about.
Are you still unsuccessfully looking for what you planned many moons ago? Your plan has an evidence trail. You’ve received an abundance of clues that your plan isn’t working and each time you ignore them, you get another mouthful of menu.
Plan a party, plan a vacation, plan your dream house, but don’t plan your life. The more time you think about every little detail, the less time you have to live life which is beyond the pale.
All the best,
John
Be Sociable, Share!