Choosing Your Way

Honesty ought to be the way to real happiness. Honesty to your own feelings, wishes, hopes. Honesty to yourself. But how can one be totally honest with one self?

Our thinking and feelings are influenced by other people, happenings and the surroundings. We are brought up in a certain way, in a certain environment. We are taught to like and want whatever typical to that environment. It seems the world has been laid in front of us in a determined way and we are only playing our part in it.

We are never alone in a way that there is always something or someone influencing us, affecting us. Yet we are always alone in leading our lives, making the decisions and standing up for our choices.

Free will might exist, fate might not be destined. But is free will nothing more than making decisions between what’s laid before you? Choosing between options that have been given? To me that sounds like being a character on a board game, where there are different options for paths to follow but all drawn by someone other than myself.

I want to step out from the board.

Sometimes I feel I already have. I have listened to myself, made my own decisions, more or less conventional. Honesty to me has been my guideline in my path; I have wanted to live listening to myself. In this chosen path, one way or another, I have tried to try different options. I have tried to do what feels right.  

Now the question remains. Have I stepped out from the board and drawn my own paths? Or have I pimped up that board, shaken it a little, stepped aside but still remained on it?

I wonder if it is possible to truly see into and understand oneself. The influence from outside can never be entirely switched off. Maybe it should be accepted that the “inner me” is in relation with what’s out there. That to be true to myself I have to accept the influence and affluence from others have become part of the real me.