Awareness Has Teeth

It can’t be unseen. As the adage goes: once you recognize something—how many Jeeps are on the road, the way Stacy talks down to her husband, or the fact that a friendship is over—you are stuck with that knowledge. Seeing things as they truly are is the first step, but it’s the follow-up that really stings: now that you know, you have to do something about it.

This is the reason we shut off awareness in the first place. Seeing the truth feels too painful because we don’t know how to fix it. Wishing for something is easy, but the cost of making it happen stings. It’s the "dreamer" part of you writing checks that the rest of you doesn’t want to cash.

This happens with both pains and desires because addressing them requires time, change, and effort—and that sounds hard. It is the complicated relationship between the parts of us that want things to be easy and the parts calling for freedom and adventure.

The shift comes when we realize the cost of change is worth it and can even be fun. "The journey is the destinaion." You know the cheesy postcard of a person on a sunset beach? A more appropriate picture for this journey would be a marathon runner or someone changing a dirty diaper.

This leads us back to an awareness of the part of ourselves we often get most defensive with—the part we attack because it tells us what we don’t want to hear. But that part is actually your friend; it is the part asking for freedom and adventure. When we give it space, it will give us experiences we’ve only dreamed of. Finding out what you're made of and realizing that you truly have what it takes to pursue the life you want (or, if you don’t know what you want yet, the strength to enter the unknown and discover it).