This Is Not My Beautiful House
Tell the truth. See what happens.
My mother once walked out of her shoes mid-stride because of a sudden dawning that she hated them. JFK Jr. famously left a screening of Casino during the scene where Pesci gets his eyeballs squeezed out of his skull. I once casually got dressed and ducked out halfway through sex because there was no chemistry. Millions of Americans are quitting their jobs in a movement termed The Great Resignation. In this late pre-truth era, it seems a hallmark of the western mental framework to overlook the obvious fact that we can cut virtually anything from our lives, immediately. Enduring the mediocre and the piss poor is not a virtue. Ask your skeleton, which is destined for either a box or an oven, if what you’re currently experiencing is worth your time. If the answer is no, leave.
As I type these words, the singer from The Talking Heads appears and floats by in the pool of my mind, all but insisting that song “Once in a Lifetime” at me.
“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, and you may find yourself in another part of the world, and you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house, and you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife...
same as it ever was... same as it ever was.”
The greatest living lies begin as micro-pivots away from our own truth in order to maintain equilibrium or the status quo, in order to keep the peace, or, more insidiously, to pull rank; basically making it easy for ourselves in the moment at the expense of our lives. If you should find yourself waking to a life that is not everything you’ve dreamed it should be, if you should find yourself quietly remarking “this is not my beautiful house”, then I suggest you get real with yourself and renovate the structure from within which awareness is experiencing life. This process begins by dismantling the old construct and becoming familiar with ground zero. How do you do that? With radical honesty.