live happily again

Truth is fine in math, chemistry, philosophy, but not in life. In life illusion, imagination, desire, hope are more important”, wrote Ernesto Sabato.

What did you want to be when you grew up? Get it back

Rereading this sentence, I inevitably think of Ruth, a young woman who attended a therapy group that I led. She had just passed a tough entrance exam for an Economics college, but she felt lost: she did not know what she wanted in life.

At one point in the workshop, We do work with expressive movement and dance. Ruth plunged into the dance with overflowing joy.she performed some perfect and high-quality steps –one could immediately tell that she had studied ballet– and, when she had been dancing for about ten minutes, I realized that she was crying.

I thought I was going to be left with the unknown of what was happening to him, but, at the end of the session, he came over to talk to me. Then she told me that she had stopped dancing to study Economics and that, moving again to the music, she had felt all the sadness that leaving the ballet aroused in her.

Since then she felt lost, but she believed that she could not choose to become a professional dancer as was her dream: she found herself unable to achieve the level of perfection required to earn a living by dancing.

“Of course you’re lost,” I told him. Along the way you have lost your illusion, the illusion that can give meaning to your life. Dancing makes you feel full. If you want to study, do it, but don’t stop dancing.

A few years later, I met Ruth again. She had created a dance school and the fact of having finished his degree in Economics –although in much longer time than expected– had allowed him to manage it better. Indeed, when something really moves us and fills us with illusion, nothing and no one can lead us to abandon itbecause, if we do, we lose the meaning of our life with it.

Illusion gives meaning to life

We talk about the true illusionof the term in its uncontaminated sense.

The word illusion comes from the Latin illusion, “deception”. can also mean “unreal perception or idea”. This meaning is present in expressions such as “optical illusion”, for example. The etymological dictionary reminds us that the verb illudere (“mock”, “make fun of”) was formed by adding a prefix to the verb ludere, “play”. It meansn the word illusion the idea of ​​play is included. Since the 19th century, the sense of illusion, which is the one that is still most deeply rooted today, is that of “live hope, favorable expectations deposited in people or things.”

Thus, in Spain illusion is a much-cherished word in the advertising world and has become the basic content of many messages and slogans, both in advertising and political campaigns. Invoking the illusion for the future seems to sell a lot.

But it is not our intention to use the term in this sense. When we talk here about recovering the illusion we refer to an illusion connected with our feelings and with the bodily well-being that carrying out a certain project or activity produces, just as Ruth did with ballet. This well-being arises when we commit ourselves to follow a desire that is born from within us.

How to incorporate illusion into our day to day

It does not mean adding a new obligation to our lifeIt’s not about setting a new goal that generates more fatigue than we already accumulate habitually.

The illusion, when it is really aligned with our nature and with who we are, it indicates the direction of the path we take in life. In contrast, when we do things only out of obligation, we feel that we are not moving forward, that we live without expectations, submerged in monotony and boredom. We are a ship adrift, aimlessly.

Each stage of life is usually marked by both an illusion and a challenge to overcome. It is a polarity in which we are all immersed and, to grow, To move from one stage to another, it is as important to know how to overcome the challenge and meet the needs that this vital moment presents us with, as it is to know how to detach from what has been achieved in order to be able to to re-excite ourselves with the challenge that the next stage presents us.

Whose illusion is it?

The problem is that some illusions are not as genuine as they appear to be, but rather they are induced by what is expected of us socially or familially. In this way, one has the illusion of having a job, a house, a child… And although these desires can be experienced as true illusions, many times they are more marked by the need to follow a model instead of arising from a true connection with what one is and want authentically. It is worth paying attention to it.

In this sense, the result of a study carried out by Cofidis on the consumption habits of Spaniards and the differences that exist between the maximum illusions that both genders have in this ambit. While men’s greatest dream is to buy a car, what women most desire is to be able to take more care of their diet in order to lose weight.

One might wonder if these illusions are connected to our authentic needs or, in reality, they respond to the patterns that determine the consumer society and our culture for each sex.

It would be a question, then, of recovering an illusion closely related to what we are, with our abilities and our gifts. In short, recovering an illusion aligned with our true mission in life. But how do we distinguish it?

How could Ruth know if she should continue dancing or if it was better to abandon her role as a dancer altogether? Why was Ruth lost? What happened to her is that she had been more attentive to what was appropriate from the social and educational model in which she was immersed than to her own well-being and instinct. She had relegated the most immediate sensations of hers. And alone To the extent that we are more connected with our body and our emotions, we can have a scale of what feels good to us and what feels bad to us.

Obligations versus responsibilities

There are people for whom the greatest illusion is to enjoy a comfortable, simple and safe life, while others need to constantly be excited about new and different things to feel alive. Each person has a way of living and none is better than another.

Recovering the illusion should not become an obligation, because if we take it that way, we continue mired in the pattern of “shoulds”. One of the most common ways to lose illusion is, precisely, fill the day to day with “shoulds” putting what is expected of us, both family and socially, before what we feel and want to do.

The more rigid we are about how we have to do things, how we have to be, and what is right and wrong, the more prisoners we are to our beliefs. We are not talking about parking responsibilities, but about differentiating them well from obligations.

“Obligation” is something that is imposed by an outside rule; “responsibility” means being consistent with what one has decided to get involved with.

Although they may be similar –in both cases the person assumes a commitment–, in obligation, the pressure towards action comes from an external imperative; while in responsibility, the impulse comes from within oneself.

To the extent that we can connect with our body and give credit to our freer sensations, we will feel, because, being more connected with ourselves, it is much easier to be excited about what we are going to be and achieve.

If your life model is only full of rules, norms and obligations about what is right and what is wrong, there is very little chance that illusion will appear., that that empty space is born in which to be able to write something different and new. It is about looking for what you want so that satisfaction arises from the fact of allowing yourself to be yourself.