The ideal-life exercise

2020-01-09 @Lifestyle

Here’s a useful exercise to periodically engage in. How do you imagine your ideal life? Many of us, although dissatisfied with the one we lead, avoid this question.

Some of us avoid it to distance from the responsibility over improving own matters. It is simpler to complain, live in mediocrity and take no action.

Some avoid the exercise out of resignation. Things are the way they are for legitimate reason, and must remain so. It is simpler to remain in a self-confined limbo.

Some employ argumentative resources as a circumvention tactic. Rather than focus on the impact the exercise is meant to render, they debase the very notion contained in the wording: the absurdity behind the quest for the ideal, the plausibility behind a perfect or imperfect existence, or a distortion into a child-like fantasy; arguments of possible logical validity, but entirely irrelevant to the purpose.

The exercise is nothing but a bridge to attain something greater and live a plentiful life. You cannot overcome the limits of your present existence without imagining/visualizing some notion of a goal.

And the more your visual transcends the status-quo, be it to the level of absurdity, the more likely you are to transition in the respective course.

While you might limit yourself to a hazy and abstract visual, I emphasize: the more concrete, the more potential lies in you aligning your present life with the ideal.

To summarize, the exercise yields to the following purposes:

  1. Gauge how well you align with your desires.
  2. Gauge what is really of importance.
  3. Trigger your consciousness into moving in the right direction.

The second is crucial. Sometimes the element we consider unsatisfactory in our existence, is merely the target of a projection triggered by some deeper-rooted issue. This exercise may help reestablish that sense of clarity.

Additionally, some of us might even face severe inhibition in painting an earnest picture of a dream life. If asked, we are conditioned to express an idea that aligns with the persona (image) we project onto society.

We even project this misconstrued idea within ourselves, as if some presence continuously exercised judgement over our thoughts. The idea, however, discords with our innate character, the one long confined to the subconscious. Read Jung’s works (as one possible source) for a deeper study of the persona and the self.

To this day I remain not entirely clear if I’ve managed to strip all the layers of the persona that accompanied me at various stages. It’s not a trivial task to evoke the subconscious at a snap of a finger.

However, I can comfortably stipulate that any element crucial to the innate happiness of my present or ideal life, I’ve integrated to varying degrees. In fact, the process involved mostly the elimination of elements of negativity.

It’s important to reemphasize that independent component analysis plays a fundamental role in identifying the necessary. Focus not on the superficiality of ideas and illusions permeated across culture, but on the root ingredients of greatest matter to you.

Here is what I’ve gathered in multiple explicit or implicit renditions of the exercise:

Some of the above bullets have remained immutable for well over a decade. Some have developed more recently.

In the course of the exercise, you may find a similar trend - some aspects fairly solid, others bearing a chance of impressibility that may or may not survive time. Yet it’s important to gauge whether you feel, in general, convergent towards the overall visual. To the contrary, reassess where you may have neglected your self; reconsider what’s important and what’s superfluous.

Questions, comments? Connect.