"If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't fit you."
- Augusten Burroughs If you find yourself hopelessly depressed, and not a single person has anything to say that can change your hopelessness, it's a feeling similar to the crushing sensation of claustrophobia. Even people in your surroundings can contribute to this. They know you are not feeling well so they shower you with uninteresting suggestions that amount to nothing. "I feel packed within the confines of my own world," said one individual.
Imagine being a small fish in a large bowl. Everything you eat makes you grow bigger and smarter. You hear and take in much knowledge from the many conversations you hear around you. You're continually fed knowledge. The words echo through the glass bowl louder than they are spoken. The words feed you, provide you wisdom coupled with your own intuition. By deciphering all this knowledge and putting it together, you have found yourself larger than the environment you're in. You soon realize you are trapped in a bowl that you are too large for. On top of this realization, the food you're eating is now bland, and much of the knowledge being fed to you is no longer stimulating. You are unable to grow from it. The conversation is one you have had many times that you already know the answer to. The thoughts and opinions being spoken by others are now negative. Suddenly, the water you're in begins to drown you. Your gills have closed and you now have lungs.
When you have become consumed by the pressing negative energy of others, direly cemented in the shackles of the town where you grew up, alienated and misunderstood by the people you grew up around, or ready to bang your head up against a brick wall every time you so little as think about enduring another boring conversation that serves no purpose to you — the time has come for you to leave the fishbowl. Sometimes, when you dare to pause and take in your surroundings; you will come to the realization you have absolutely nothing in common with your friends anymore. You discover that you and your nearest and dearest friends are bound to one another for the wrong reasons, like routine or circumstance or..., location. It’s sad to feel like you’re residing on the outside of your circle — displaced in a group of friends that once felt like your family. They actually were residing in that fishbowl with you at one point. However, something changed. You learned a piece of knowledge that cracked the bowl you were in. Often when this happens, small-minded people will never understand you, inquiring individuals will seek to understand you, but only wholehearted people will want to follow you.
A beautiful Betta Fish is the only thing beautiful in a bowl of water. There is no feeling lonelier than feeling isolated and disconnected in a sea of familiar people. You can’t grow when you’re forever tethered to the place you've always lived. You will become painfully uncomfortable being so comfortable — excessive restlessness physically hurts. One has to resolve in their mind to refuse to be the person who gives up and sits on their hands complaining about how unstimulated they are in their environment when one has all the power in the world to make a change. Often the change has to start slow because decisions followed by a process have to play out.
Yes, it DOES take work. It takes practicing the tricky art of saving money and enduring loneliness while at the beginning of your new adventure..., but it’s the ultimate way to widen your world and relieve your depression. You might need to leave the fishbowl when the conversation is abusive. The most empowering part of being an adult is this: You don’t have to accept abuse from anyone ever again. When we’re kids, we are often trapped in hopeless situations that are completely out of our control. For example, a bad step-parent or paternal parent can ruin your childhood based on their decisions. However, these old decisions do not need to be the decisions that would shackle you to one specific place.
As adults, we have the wonderful capability to stick up for ourselves and leave our abusers stuck in the thunderstorm they created. Parents can also teach their children this at an early age as long as parents know how to maturely handle a situation involving minors. If your extended family, coworkers, friends, lovers or parents are still mistreating you, don’t stand for it.
You are a STRONG, powerful, fully realized human being with the means to stick up for yourself and cut out the bad energy ruining what could be the adventure you've never had. Many think you need a ridiculous amount of money to #travel. I am here to tell you that it is not true, as I brought out in a previous #blog post: How We Get Paid to Travel. I've since been updating this blog post as I've discovered new ways of making #money on our #travels.
Nothing will help you regain your lust for life like traveling. Getting on a plane and gazing down at the tiny houses and the pint-sized bodies of waters will free you of your apathy and put it all in perspective. A tiny town, tiny people, tiny thoughts. Their thoughts are as big as the world they chose to be in. Never leaving such a tiny place doesn't allow for growth.
Tasting exotic flavors, listening to an unfamiliar rhythm, hearing new words in different accents, trotting around strange cities and indulging your eyeballs in brand new sights is like an electric shock treatment for the heart within your heart. Everyone reading this article, your hearts are beating at this very moment. The reason that your hearts beat is that you have to move this molecule through your blood called hemoglobin. Hemoglobin carries a smaller molecule called Heme B, also known as protoheme IX. The heart of Heme B is a single atom of iron. So in a way, the heart of our heart is made of iron. We need to give our hearts something to beat for, to push our iron hearts through our blood. This heart of our heart is what helps us bind oxygen and move it through our circulatory system.
How do you know that where you are is where you want to be if you don't know where else there is?
Jeffrey Kottmann, a dive instructor who practically lives in the ocean and has traveled extensively says, "From my point of view, traveling is really important. Its the best way to get out of your comfort zone and it helps you to experience life in different ways. You can learn a lot about all the different cultures, but you have to be there to really experience it, and live it. If you don't take the time to travel and wander around the world, you are missing a lot out of life."
If you don't find what you are doing in life is fascinating, more than likely no one else will either. You will become what others hate about themselves, and no one will want to be around you. Inspire others, and in turn, be inspired yourself.
The fish in our illustration found the water he lived in was choking him. The water was dead water, affected by negative energy. Doctor Masaru Emoto exposed music, words, and language to water and how it crystalized into geometry based on the energy and emotions being conveyed. Masaru Emoto was a Japanese author and pseudoscientist who said that human consciousness has an effect on the molecular structure of water. He proved that thoughts and emotions can change the shape of water. Our bodies are made of sixty-percent water. If our surrounding water has been affected by negative emotions and energy, chances are that sixty percent of ourselves will always feel negative. It's time to heal yourself by escaping the fishbowl and diving into water that is full of positive life.
The ocean has been proven to be therapeutic and healing to a damaged individual. The ocean can not only heal cuts with salt, but it has the ability to trigger a deep psychological state of calm and contentment. It can literally wash away the pain.
Perhaps you were in the fishbowl so long that by the time you got out you couldn't walk correctly. The ocean can cause you to feel light, almost weightless. It's like a hand holding you up and giving you guidance until the deformity caused by a cramped fishbowl can straighten you out. The ocean waves can also smack us into shape as a way of readjusting our crooked mental state.
About the #ocean and #diving, Jeffrey Kottmann said, "Diving beneath the ocean is just like entering another world. The instant you are underwater there is a silence that you can never find on land. Even if the waves above you are rough, there is calm beneath that you never want to come up from. You try to spend as much time as your lungs can spare beneath the waves. For me, it is a kind of peace and relaxation that nothing on land could ever replace. On top of all that, I see new creatures all the time and others I see often but never tire of seeing. There are many creatures we still don't know exists down there. The ocean is the best gift."
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