Have You Ever Asked Yourself – “Is This All There Is?”

Have you ever wanted something, either to achieve something or possess something, and you invested desire, excitement, and expectation? You built a picture in your imagination of what your success or the object of your desire would look like and what it would fell and be like to have it and you set out to achieve it. You extended yourself with effort and focus and realized in time your desire? The immediate experience of your success was very fulfilling with pride, a feeling of potency, a sense of self-esteem as well as the enjoyment in what you’d achieved or manage to get. But sometime after, perhaps a day or a month, the sheen had fallen from your experience. The luster and glow of your success began to wane if not fall away entirely and you were left with a puzzlement. How could so rewarding an experience lose its intensity, its thrill so quickly? And what is it in the nature of pursuit and achievement that is so easily lost? In other words did you ever ask yourself ---Is This All There Is?

This is not unusual and, more to the point, it’s a common experience. The diminishment of your experience was certainly a letdown and, because that diminishment happens quite regularly, it can lead to disheartenment, disillusionment, uneasiness about the whole idea of wanting/desiring something, even to despair and the thought of just giving up or maybe just getting drunk. What would be the point of doing that again, albeit with different goals? Why bother?

Everyone alive has had this experience of imagining an end result and then, once achieved, watching it fade and even collapse and not being able to do anything about it.

But what if the process of the withering and even the collapse of what you imagined and the resistance and even refusal to reach out again was a fundamental part of the fabric of life and necessary to support growth and your personal evolution?

You Can Never Step Into the Same River Twice

Heraclitus of Ephesus, (535 BC – 475 BC), the Greek philosopher believed that ever-present change is the foundation of the universe. Another way to say this is that everything flows. Hence you cannot step twice into the same river because the waters you stepped into have passed and new waters, for that split-second and every split-second thereafter, are engulfing your feet.

Human experience, as such, cannot be fixed in, or confined to any one moment. No matter how you may try to hold onto something, experience keeps on moving. If it did not you would be dead. As long as you are alive, even minimally, life moves.

So What of Your Expectation?

Your expectation is part of the streaming of experience and it has its own life length. When it peaks it will began to progressively dissipate under the pressure of ever ongoing experiencing until it is gone. Then its intensity is reduced and what was vivid becomes a memory with the “thinness” that memory has. But this is good thing. What is vivid must recede to make room for whatever follows. That is the beauty and power and value of our moving life---it is ever crisp and immediate.

You may cry out that “this is too much work, too much demand. I want the flow to settle down, perhaps even for a moment.” But again that is a way of wishing for death. As I said, as long as you are alive, even minimally, life moves.

Is This All There Is?

In the context of our moving life-stream, that flow that cannot be contained, is this all there is? is a cry of pain, perhaps a deep sorrow, perhaps a fiery rage---profound loss or rebellion against the inevitable change and changing.

But, from another point of view grounded in the reality of your moving life, when you feel the impulse to ask is this all there is you should cry out Halleluiah---because in so doing you will be giving your assent to life, your recognition, acceptance, and full participation in what is most real about being alive---change. You will be in alignment with what is and growing as life expects and demands that you do---to the extent of your capability.

So fading diminishment as your moment of success peaks is the regular and powerful cadence of life. You must move---move or die---and not necessary physical death but soul death if you insist on hanging on.

It may seem like slowing down or stopping is the safe stance and, of course, doing that will reduce many of life’s demands, but that’s a trajectory toward death---final death and more important, a deathlike life.

George Bernard Shaw, the renowned British playwright said, “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die…Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.”

What’s your experience with this?

(Photo Credit:Robert-Jan van Lotringen /Flickr)

Jim Sniechowski has published his first novel, Worship of Hollow Gods, at Amazon.com. In Worship of Hollow Gods Jim bears witness to the world of a sensitive, nine-year-old boy, subjected to the underbelly of his Polish Catholic family in working class Detroit. The year is 1950. The family gathers for a Friday night family poker/pinochle party. The outcome reveals a world no one ever talked about then and are forbidden to talk about now---the unspoken, the impermissible, the reality beneath every family’s practiced facade---and what lies beneath when the front has been ripped away. Worship of Hollow Gods is available now in Kindle and paperback for athttps://tinyurl.com/hollowgods

James Sniechowski, PhD and his wifeJudith Sherven, PhDhttps://JudithandJim.comhave developed a penetrating perspective on people’s resistance to success, which they call The Fear of Being Fabulous. Recognizing the power of unconscious programming to always outweigh conscious desires, they assert that no one is ever failing. They are always succeeding. The question is, at what?

Currently working as consultants on retainer to LinkedIn providing executive coaching, leadership training and consulting as well as working with private clients around the world, they continually prove that when unconscious beliefs are brought to the surface, the barriers to greater success and leadership presence begin to fade away. They call it Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous.https://OvercomingtheFearofBeingFabulous.com