Relationships begin long before we even know what a relationship is. Life is about relationships, it is not about who can better live a solitary life, there are enough inmates in the world who’d win that segment. In the early stages of life when things were simple and filled with promise, I was a child. Now that I have grown older and can peel back the layers of my life with clarity, I envy that child and frown at the man I’ve become because I feel I have replaced some very important values with things so uncommon to who I am now.

As we grow older and become adults, the passing years that add to the sophistication of growing older merely takes away our youth and replaces it with a modified version of a stranger we’ve only become familiar with. Our life experiences are nothing more than many sequences of time stitched together to form the cinematic view of the totality of our existence. Although we all are on the same journey to find the meaning of life, oftentimes it seems so ordinary in that throughout the search, the meaning goes unperceived, leaving us with nothing more than feelings of anguish and uncertainty, this is a relationship we are having with the world.

Have you ever wondered why you specifically do the things you do, what makes you think the way you think, react to situations the way you do, and what elements go into the forming of the present day you? We are not simply a conglomerate of things learned and absorbed along this path of growth, but rather we are, from childhood, a small piece seeking to be part of a big chunk, seeking to form the total essence of something, only we don’t know what that something is. As children, we begin discovering who we are through the things we come in contact with, things like toys, books, people and the growing understanding of feelings associated with good and bad.

The things that captured my curiosity when I was a kid are no longer relevant to who I am today, or so I believe. however, it does create within me a picture of the road I traveled. But as time again moves forward, those things too soon dissipate from my conscious level and become welded in that place I call my imagination or subconscious. Soon those stored memories begin to take on another form; they become our daily and future thoughts and feelings of self and the world in which we live, we are having a relationship with self.

Psychologist claim that from childhood we begin to develop our physical personality based on association and other emotional responses coming in from the outside. I believe in part some of that is true, but it is not the total process. I believe our physical personality is formed to correspond with the body we inhabit. Environment and the circumstances of where we are do not contribute to the structure of personality, but rather it enables us the ability to use those resources to navigate the point of where we are in this life. We can become whatever we choose at any given moment once we know how. Sometimes we do it without knowing, usually as a response to the circumstances in which we are experiencing right now, that is a relationship with circumstance.

In many ways I have become the person I wanted to be, you have become the person you wanted to be; only we are not aware of it. We did not enter this human form ignorantly, this body we have is not who we are. Our bodies are a protective covering, we are inside. I am aware of who I should be based on the significance of my thoughts today. I moan and cry about my job and my relationships and when I change those elements seeking a more favorable blend I find I am right back where I started. As baby’s, we begin with a clean slate free of judgment, criticism, hate, jealousy and all the other emotions we pick up along the way as we grow and learn. Entwined with our infancy are pure thoughts and creative patterns vying to take shape as we discover more and more of what it is we like doing and being a part of. Parents have an unconscious tendency to want to pass on to their children the elements of what they believe to be the standards of living. Most people who attempt to teach the values of living are themselves, victims, not knowing that what they teach is ineffectual, this is a relationship with discontent.

All the misguided information the world is selling is not always about you. The key is to claim what fits and wear it as a personal image of who you are. This image has to fit within the relationships you are having, otherwise, you are doomed to failed relationships that have been born of false information and identity. Whenever you have a relationship with something or someone you need to pay attention to how it is making you feel. Oftentimes we enter into a relationship and halfway through decide we no longer want that so we amputate it from our lives and leave it to decompose. At that moment a spot of emptiness becomes almost a physical reality, a light goes on in your head, and again you are in search for someone to fill the void in your life, this is having a relationship with baggage.

This is the beginning of a series of relationship models based on my own experience, hopefully, you’ll find yourself in there and come to see the meaning of it all. #writing