Life as it is!

byMTCandela1

3.9K followers

1 year ago

Childhood is characterized by what psychoanalysts described as “magical thinking “ - a perception that we can control occurrences with our minds and that all our wishes are achievable. As a child, do you remember when you used to sing, “Rain,rain, go away. Come again another day. Little children wants to play.” Or when you thought the sun rose in the morning because you woke up and that it set in the evening because like you, it has to sleep?

When my daughter was around four years old, we would play a game while in the car to keep herself busy, plus an opportunity for a learning experience sometimes. But mostly, just a game to entertain ourselves. As we approached a traffic light that is red, we briefly close our eyes to wish loudly for the light to turn green, open our eyes and surely the light turned green. As we proceed with the travel, as the traffic light was about to change, I would stretch my right arm forward , pointing to the traffic light, as if doing a command and shout, “Change!” And sure enough, the light turns red. For a four year old, it was magical! Until it was not.

For sometime, children enjoy the perception that everything happens as we wished it to be, and that somehow, in their minds, as they dream or think of something good, they have the power, control and significance. We see it in the movie all the time. It is a form of escape, as without this illusion, they would be overwhelmed by a world that feels unpredictable and unmanageable. Even as adults, we want some of that power, some sense of order, an assurance that if we perform some basic organized process, everything will take place as expected.

However, if we scratch the surface of our illusions, we see our uncertainty. And that uncertainty will sometimes bring fear. And it’s that fear that we realized was rooted in childhood when we weren’t able to survive on our own. Our parents were our security. With out them, we feel at a loss. We carry our childhood beliefs into our adult lives to ward off reality of how little power, control and significance we actually have.

Most of us still cling to the belief that we’re different, somehow set apart from the rest of humanity. We imagine that we have an exemption from the harshness of life. Bad things happen, but not to us. The truth however, is that we aren’t privileged. We will not be spared loss, failure, sorrow. We will not be protected from illness or death. Life doesn’t distinguish between saints and sinners when it dishes out its share of tragedies and disasters. We’re ordinary. What happens to other people also happens to us.

When the fantasy of our specialness crumbles, we’re forced to see ourselves and the world in a radically different way. It’s more difficult for us to pretend that we have it all together. We feel exposed. We’re confronted with how little we know. Another layer of our illusions is peeled back. We become open to life, not as we thought it should be, but as it is. This is truly humbling.

Still, most of us build our lives in such a way as to starve off our anxiety about how little control we have. We cling to the pretense that we write the scripts for our lives. When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, when nothing seems to work, we try to manipulate life so that things will turn out the way we think they ought to. But more often than not, this just adds to our anxiety and despair.

Oh life, it isn’t after all what we perceived it to be!