Living with Intention
🥯 Sunday Bagel December 22nd 🥯
Last night i was watching this clip from CBS News about the Japanese man who was in a real life version of The Truman Show.
Tomoaki Hamatsu was stripped naked and lived in an apartment for 15 months. His only “work” was to fill in mail order sweepstakes. The experiment was cruel to say the least, but it shows a few interesting things.
The first is that we all have a choice in what we get to enjoy or subject ourselves to.
He could’ve called the emergency line and said I need to get out of here.
And more importantly, the door out of the unit was unlocked the entire time. He just didn’t want to go through it because he was naked and was ashamed.
This poor man would rather endure the endless hell of eating crackers and filling out sweepstakes all day rather than have some random strangers see his zucchini. Which was being shown to a camera the whole time anyways.
And nor can you fault him for not being able to make better decisions - he subjected himself to a twisted science experiment that happened to be televised. Once he entered into the situation all logic had gone out the window it seems.
You have a choice in the matter and all matters in life. Even when you tell yourself you have to do this or that thing. And more importantly, you must remember that you created every circumstance that you are surrounded by today.
If it was an event that caused you suffering, then you obviously didn’t create that event, but you created the imprint it left on you or the coping mechanism that you use to deal with it.
You accepted job offers that were crap or agreed to date someone that shoplifts. You choose to not work out, and you choose to eat grocery store birthday cake.
And just as you choose those things, you can make better choices moving forward if that’s what you need at this time.
Start from a place of knowing what you want and what makes your life meaningful. Make decisions based on this idea.
And remember that even though Hamatsu’s ordeal seems far removed from our daily life, the tendency to accept table scraps is very easy to fall into, and it’s our job to let go of that way of living.
This is what it means to live with intention.
Good one