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''Mary, listen to me. Please, pay attention carefully. Nobody has had your journey.''
A few days back, I came up with this wise advice for myself. For some reason, although every time I hear it from my soul it sets me free, I tend to forget it. This is why today, I've decided to elaborate on it. I want to really understand what that means. I want some wise words to come out from me today, so I can read them back later, and recover my joy in those days in which I decide to throw it away for no good reason. So let’s go soul, talk to me. I'm ready to learn.
I believe that having a unique journey is one of the most beautiful things there is. More than beautiful, I find it particularly exciting. Each one of us has a secret of their own. Each one of us has something that nobody else in the entire world will completely understand. We'll find people that resonate with us. People that share with us an unbelievable number of things, experiences or points of view. That's great. However, my point goes beyond that. Nobody has been with us through absolutely all of our experiences, from the moment we remember being alive.
Going back to this realisation has brought peace to me every time I get upset when somebody doesn’t understand me. Although it sounds simple, remembering this has been magic. It allows me to turn an unpleasant feeling into something exciting. At some point, I don’t even understand where the need of being fully understood comes from. What is the point, anyways? Isn’t it enough for us to know? Isn’t it exciting that nobody will ever know the complexity in our head, thoughts, and experiences as well as we do? Isn’t that a treasure to be proud of?
No need to fully understand
When I think about it, there is really no need to fully understand those who think different from us. Because in the same way, just like us, they have a precious secret that we will never get to see. By secret, I don’t mean an actual secret. I mean that no matter how much detail someone puts into explaining an experience, we will never perceive it exactly the way they did. And this is not a bad thing. This is just the way it is, and accepting it, makes life much more pleasurable. When our friend tells us a funny thing that happened to him, we picture an idea in our mind that may be as funny as what he lived, and which gets us to laugh. We somehow believe we know exactly how his experience was, but what we have done is simply build up a story in our mind with our imagination, probably very far from what he is describing.
What really matters
I don’t think that visualising exactly the same things, is what's important in life. I think what matters is what we feel. What our own experiences, or an outside story, makes us feel. Sometimes we leak our energy overthinking why other people are not ‘as good’ as us. Why they are so boring, or negative, or annoying. Why they are not as funny, outgoing, and friendly as us. We don’t realise that we are asking ourselves a question with no answer, because that question is a lie.
If somebody else, had had exactly the same experiences as us, from the second they were conceived until today, that person would basically be us. Some people have lived experiences much more similar to ours than other people. These are the persons with whom we resonate the must. To our eyes, they are the funniest, smartest, and most incredible persons. I believe this is why it is so common to meet people from completely different cultures and not get along with them as easily as we do with people from our same culture. I have realised through years living outside my country, that letting go of the need to explain in detail the behaviours of others, is one of the most relieving things we can do for ourselves. Not only it is relieving, but it allows us to connect with much more people, in a way deeper ways than we ever thought possible.
It's okay that they don't get it
When we understand that they're very far from knowing and understanding our background and every experience that has shaped us until today, we don’t mind if they don’t get us. It gets even better than that. We don’t expect them to. Even better. We know they won’t. Even better. We don’t need or want them to, because we know it is impossible. We know that we will find precious people in our path that we resonate with, and to whom we won’t need to explain much to feel understood. However, we don’t need that either to be happy. That is something that adds up to our joy. We are already fulfilled. And we are fulfilled because we know who we are, and we know that there is no need for anybody else to know us exactly the way we already know ourselves. We know that what we know is unique, because we are the only ones who completely understand it. We know that we are the only ones that have lived life the way we have. We know there is no price tag we can put on our whole life experience. There is no comparison. There is nobody, who knows exactly everything we know.
Only you know
We know everything that we've been through. We remember everything that we've learned and we own it. We don’t expect people to know what we learned from experiences that they have never had the opportunity to have. And what is beautiful about this feeling, is that it finally allows us to see that they also have a precious secret. It makes us curious, but in a good way.
We release
We don’t expect to understand them fully. And because we know that we won’t understand them fully, we allow ourselves to understand them little by little. We finally let go of the resistance. We don’t expect some people to make us laugh in the same way other people do. We learn to appreciate the qualities in every person around us. We appreciate the ones who makes us laugh, and we appreciate the ones that open us up to something we don’t know.
We begin to see the beauty in every human being. We don’t expect them to act a certain way, have a certain attitude, or say a certain thing. We don’t condition our personality based on theirs. We learn to accept and love who they are, and we let out who we are. We don’t judge them or us. We become perfectly comfortable with the fact of not being liked or understood by certain people. We know that they don’t know our secret, and we don’t know theirs either. We finally make peace with the diversity of life, and we feel free to continue doing what we're in this world to do. To be ourselves.
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