Feelings are honest. Thoughts sometimes lie.

Feeling can be confusing. Especially if a feeling is new. It might be hard to describe and put your finger on it at first. Letting it roll around your head to get the feel of it.

Do people even bother to wonder how they are feeling? Do people glide through life not really noticing their thoughts and feelings. Rushing from one to-do list task to the next, the one important task to the next urgent one. Putting out fires in their busy lives, rushing from one appointment to the next. Driving on empty and managing to refuel at the weekends.

Why is there a desire to achieve? Where does it come from? Is it a Western concept? This desire to compete, to achieve, to have ambition, to excel, to do? Is it necessary in life? Is it making our lives more difficult? Does it make us feeling incomplete without it? Unfinished?

We are enough as we are. Why is there this push in Western society to do more. To rest is considered laziness. To have no desire, drive, ambition is seen as a weakness rather than a strength. To be content is to be satisfied, or at peace. To forever be chasing more means you will never be content with you as you are now.

When we attain some new achievement there may be a rush of adrenaline and excitement but the new bar is higher now and to achieve another new high becomes harder and harder. The excitement shorter and the satisfaction duller. The human condition is to want more. It doesn’t stop. You can make it stop though.

Step off the wheel and be content with where you are now, today.

Evaluate where you are. What you want, what you need. Where you want to be. Who you want to be with or surround yourself with. Does the you of yesterday match what the you of today thinks? Can you trust your thoughts of either time period? How do you know what is true? How do you evaluate yourself and your life? Through facts alone? Feelings?

How do you evaluate your life? Yourself? Don’t compare yourself with anyone. You will always be not enough as some, and more than others. Then where does it get you? No further. It doesn’t matter about other people. You are alone in this world. You arrive alone. You live in a world alone with your thoughts. You can chose to share them with others or not. And then you die alone.

Learning to live with yourself and being content is one’s life work, is it not? Nothing else matters, right? If you happen to do extra, then that is the icing on the top of the cake of oneself. Your cake might be heavy with icing and hollow in the centre. Only you will know. Icing covers up the mistakes. And mistakes are what we do make. They are necessary in life. We learn from them. We read about other people and their lives and their doings. Reading about the past helps learn about the present and the future. Not always but it helps. It gives comfort, sorrow and hope.

Sometimes no matter how many biographies we read we don’t learn from other people. Egos get in the way of betterment. Evaluations lie by the wayside. Invincibility leads to disaster because we are all fallible. But aren’t we supposed to make mistakes to learn? Perhaps. But not to the detriment of others.

Are you honest with yourself? Do you catch yourself in a lie? Or do you only realise after the fact? Pay attention to yourself and notice what you think and feel. You may surprise yourself. Pleasantly or otherwise.