Stop trying to find yourself. Create yourself. Stop burying your head in distractions because life seems to lack meaning, find your own meaning.
We live in a culture where Anti-Depressants are the most prescribed drug after Antibiotics. Certain demographic groups are more likely to die from suicide than literally anything else. Many people are spending more time and effort trying to feel good about themselves and the direction of their lives than they are just living it. Many people lack any real meaning or purpose. For this reason, people will look for projects to distract them; projects that will be so all consuming that they won’t have the time to stop and notice the futility of their lives. They play computer games to the point of addiction, getting themselves lost in a world of adventure and magic (the magic could be nothing more than the opportunity to rise from the dead after failure and start again). They follow other people playing a sport to the point of total association; you hear football fans saying things like “we won” meaning that a football team, that they personally have nothing to do with other than watching, won. In one study they found that around 40% of English men said that without football their lives would be meaningless; and few of them actually play football. These projects need not be, of themselves meaningless or without virtue in their own right, but they can still be a distraction to stop those involved from taking a moment to really look at their own lives, for fear that they will discover them to be futile.
Let me make a suggestion. A suggestion based on an awful lot of long-term studies (one Harvard study, that I’m thinking about, has been going one for 70 years now) into what makes people happy and healthy, content and fulfilled. It is the quality of your relationships that will make the greatest influence on your life. Not the number of them; the quality. It’s about feeling secure in those relationships that you have.
Here’s the thing. Until you are content, secure and happy with who you are, you won’t be able to sustain a secure and happy relationship. When you like yourself, others will like you too. When you love yourself, others will love you too. When you respect yourself, yep you guessed, others will too. I’m sure you’re getting the idea now. Kung Fu Living is a mechanism for developing the skills, the power and the discipline to become the person you most wish to be, the person you can love and respect. It is a process designed to enable you to recreate yourself into the best you possible. It is about ‘mastering your potential.’ It will change the way you think about others and the way you think about yourself and in doing so, it will prepare the scene for better relationships, and enable you to create your own meaning in life rather than simply distract yourself from noticing the lack of meaning.
