Perhaps the most dramatic and fascinating component of life is that we were not born with a user manual. Look around you, everything you use has a user manual. From the pan bought in Ikea, to the phone or laptop on which you read what I write here, each of the things in our lives have a user manual, often with a predictable logic so that you can use the good in optimal conditions.
Life, however, does not come with a manual. Neither do your body or mind. You are liberated in consciousness when you are born, and you struggle for a lifetime to find out who you are, what you are looking for here, what is good, and above all, how you can “use” what you have, so that you can get what you want. It’s not an easy task, especially since you learn that it is more important to belong to norms than to be in some way unique. Essentially, it is more important for us to take the Baccalaureate and to be in the category of those who have this distinction, than to use what we have learned in our daily lives. It is more important to dress according to the community’s etiquette than to feel comfortable with what you wear. And the examples are perpetuated over the years in various forms, some funny, others with a tragic accent.
The good news is that, at some point in our evolutionary journey, as Mr. Maslow rightly says, we give up conforming and just be. We give up the various forms of social belonging to belong to us.
“Aging means throwing all preconceived ideas overboard. It means becoming easier, freer. In a certain sense, you are younger when you are old and older when you are young”, said Radu Beligan at the age of 97.
But what if we don’t want to get to 97 to ‘be young’ and feel lighter, freer? How do we find this manual of life earlier to live our lives more meaningfully? The answer would include thousands of years of reflection by thinkers, philosophers, and academics, without any of them coming to the consensus of a very easy-to-follow plan.
Life would be easier if it came with a user manual. It would be easier if we followed each step, knowing exactly what awaits us around the corner. But isn’t that the purpose of life? To write the manual page by page because it is our life? And to help others complete their own manual for a meaningful life.
Hence the need, but also our joy, to grow people!
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