You Are Not Here To Play It Safe

"Remember, you are not here to play it safe. You are here to start fires." - Sera Beak

Yet how many of us spend our lives playing it by the former. Fear being the controlling factor. Fear carefully and purposely cultivated by parents, bosses, peers, friends, society, the economy, and religion. With all of these players having a hand at molding you into their ideal, we traipse around life never heeding our own inner voice but instead live it mimicking those that hold influence. If we go back, way back to the time when we were children and lived fearlessly exploring the world around, learning through success and failure and not letting the latter deter us from trying again, we learn that we were all born with courageous hearts to live by the latter, to live life to the fullest, because back then nothing stopped us and we rarely played it safe. And we felt alive and happy and our souls were free.

As children we believed in ourselves. We believed we could do things even when others didn't. But as we grew, fear became part of our daily diet; it was necessary to keep us safe and in control. And so we took the advice of those older and "wiser" and allowed their perceptions on how life should be lived to be absorbed into our being. These perceptions, usually borne of fear, was the last refuge and absolute controlling power. And so their "facts" in time became our own and we accepted them without thought to question because it was based on wisdom and experience that had been handed down generation to generation. Now having properly sowed those seeds of fear, we had successfully been introduced into the cookie-cutter society where individuality was frowned upon and little by little, layer by layer, we stripped our courage to live life authentically and stripped our inner voice of power and instead began to condition ourselves into what we now believed society expected of us. It was for our own good and thus began our journey into being nothing more than carbon copies of each other.

And so we proceeded with life sometimes in a state of boredom and sometimes in a state of indifference with the malaise of others inside our bodies spreading like cancer. We had many good days, months, sometimes years and yes we weren't always bored or sad, but we just always felt something was missing. We could never understand the root of our listlessness and our lack to be completely fulfilled because we had long abandoned that inner voice that, if asked, could have answered the questions we mulled over time and time again.

But then....

then one day we were wakened from that entranced state, not by the outside voices that held power, but by our own inner voice that could no longer be silenced. And we were no longer afraid. We finally acknowledged that voice, the voice that had been chosen for us alone, that voice that had held fealty to us all this time even when we failed to reciprocate. And the voice, finally sensing that we were once again one, engaged its vocal chords and vibrated our thoughts and desires out into the world. It screamed its existence and expected acknowledgment and overpowered everything else around that we could no longer hear the fears of others above its din. And the releasing of that voice was like a drug. It calmed us, finally sating that listlessness and ennui that had lived inside of us but that we could never fix. It sparked the fire within that had been nothing but a slow dying ember, an ember that refused to be fully extinguished because it believed that one day we would return to spark it to a flame. And it finally freed our souls to connect to the essence of who we truly were and said, "Remember, you are not here to play it safe. You are here to start fires." And so we finally did.