09 - Identity as a driver
Sometimes I get stressed, I look at my current situation and I cannot imagine it will be better later. I calm down when I see hope in a situation, and suddenly I tell myself that I should never have stressed so much because the situation improves and, in fact, I could have enjoyed the whole period when I was thinking about the future. This creates wide gaps between my emotional states, my emotions become binary. I think that becoming aware of this lets us stabilise this gap between emotions and enjoy the moment we are in, because maybe little, even very little, separates us from the emotional state where we feel good and the one where we project ourselves when we will feel good, hence the word binary.
Many reflections of this kind bring me to the same point: the present moment. We know it, living in the present moment has been repeated so much that we forget it. It is like reducing screen time, we are constantly exposed to videos and posts about what we should not do, we ignore them, it becomes a banality, like the warning âsmoking killsâ on cigarette packs. I think that even if we had âUsing your phone every day for an average of 3 - 4 h makes you lose about two months per year, more than ten years of your lifeâ it would not change peopleâs behaviour.
We do what we have personally committed to. Personal commitment is far more powerful than any moral lesson, because it is you.
Just like identity, as soon as we define ourselves as a certain person, we embody it and we will do what we claim to be. Simply making music is totally different from seeing yourself as a musician. The same for sport, seeing yourself as an athlete is not the same as simply doing sport. Because it embodies what we are, it defines us. Of course we should not start defining ourselves as every profession and every passion in the world, we must find what we want to be and commit to it.