The Bigger Picture Shalini SinhaThere is nothing you have to do with your life. Absolutely nothing. There is no particular job you have to have. You don't have to earn loads of money. There is no right person you have to spend your time with. You don't have to get married or have children. There is nothing specific you have to eat. Nowhere in particular you have to go. There is nothing you have to do.
Sound like a cryptic riddle for the meaning of life? For most of us, it is. On any given morning, we face a list of things we have to do and things we should do. We are driven by obligation; driven by external pressures and demands. In this, what we really want has moved so far down the list it barely registers anymore.
Still, the secret to life is that there is genuinely no requirement. This is your life, and the most definite thing we know about it is that it can be as unique as you are. It needn't look like the examples you see around you.
You have the freedom to do this differently. Most importantly, there is nothing you are supposed to do, no right or wrong answer, no prescription.
The ugly truth is that most of us don't feel this. We don't feel we have an inherent value - that our birth, our formation, in and of itself, was remarkable enough to give value to our lives.
Not only do we make many key decisions based on a distorted sense of what we should be doing, but we also fill our days with mundane actions that reflect what we believe others (family or community) expect of us.
Unfortunately, as a result, few of us are driving our lives. Instead, we are being driven somewhere that often neither makes sense nor nurtures our own confidence, imagination or values. And, we feel powerless to stop this. We feel too isolated to take risks and believe in our own vision for life.
The only thing we have to do in life is express ourselves. Express our sense of joy, our values and our capabilities. This is what life is about: an expression, your expression, your engagement with the world.
I believe that from the time we are born, our first motivation for doing anything is not to fulfil our physical needs - of food, shelter or warmth. This is not to say that they aren't important. If those needs went unmet, we would die within hours and days. But, our actions are not about trying to meet those needs. We simply cannot. We are unable. The human baby is born without the ability to even lift its head, let alone roll over, crawl towards something that might assist with its physical survival and pull that thing towards it.
Rather, we are born presuming others will assist in meeting those needs for us. And so, our first motivation for doing anything is to nurture connections.
One of the first things a newborn baby does is look for eye contact. If provided (uninterrupted and without self-consciousness), that baby will hold that eye contact for some time. We begin by reading where we are in the world, who is around us and where we belong. We form relationships instantly. This is our most basic need and it is this alone that will ensure our survival in the world.
When we first look to make these connections, our thoughts are not: am I good enough, will this person like me, have I done enough or what should I do to prove myself to them? Rather than being insecure, we are born simply expressing our existence.
And yet, by the time most of us are 12 or 13 years old, we are very insecure about ourselves. We have gained deeply entrenched struggles of feeling invisible, unloved and invaluable, and we carry these into our adulthood. There is something we are doing wrong with each other if this is happening. Something we are doing wrong with ourselves. And we must change it.
It's not rocket science to notice we have built our institutions and industries in directions that have strayed far away from nurturing the basic need for human connection.
We are distracted by pursuits that have little to do with our fundamental nature.
Participating in this for a long time has made us increasingly insecure and this has been confusing. We have subjected each other, and in particular the children around us, to these confusions and insecurities. As a result, we have struggled with issues of being judgmental, controlling and discouraging to each other.
We can break this cycle only by doing things that radically nurture our own significance. This begins with a thought (that we have nothing else to do in this life but express ourselves), invokes our imagination and requires actions to make it real.
Very quickly, we will notice that what is most important to us is nurturing our connections. After that, what we really want is to have some fun.
If we hold up these two elements as our priority, I'm sure our imagination will find ways to have our basic physical needs met.
What we will have discovered along the way is a recipe for a life extraordinary.
ssinha@irish-times.ie
Shalini Sinha is a life coach and Bowen practitioner in her clinic, Forward Movement, based in Dublin.