Project Vision 21

Recently, after a community presentation, a person came up to me and said, “I thought I knew my life, but in reality, I only knew my problems.” My unexpected interlocutor offered a short thank you and promptly left, leaving me with the feeling that her brief statement expressed and at the same time hid a multitude of problems.

Without meaning to, or perhaps fully aware of what she was saying, this person expressed a truth that often goes unnoticed by most of us: knowing our problems does not mean knowing our life. Unfortunately, this confusion of “problems” with “life” reduces all of life to an endless series of unresolved problems.

The question then arises: Why do we confuse having problems with living? Understand well: the question is not “Why are there always problems in our lives?”, a question to which philosophers, theologians, poets, and founders of religions, among others, have given countless answers.

Our question does not focus on the reason for problems (or suffering, or evil, however you want to consider it), but on the reason that leads us to assume that living and having problems are one and the same “thing” ( although, of course, life is not a “thing”). One possible reason, if we can go to Carl Jung, is our level of maturity, or rather, immaturity.

Paraphrasing Jung, we can say that problems are not solved, but rather one matures to overcome them. But in order to mature we must take responsibility for our own actions and the results of those actions. On the contrary, far from inviting us to assume that responsibility, our sociocultural context invites us to look for who we can blame.

Therefore, as Father Richard Rohr teaches, few people (if any) reach that “second half” of life, which is not a chronological half, but precisely assuming responsibility for one's own life, problems included. . But this task of meditation and contemplation requires much more effort than watching a video or following an influencer.

A possible second answer to what leads us to confuse “life” with “problems” is the growing inability to think that there are alternatives, that is, that there are opportunities and possibilities not yet explored. When the only message we hear is that there are no options for us, sooner or later we begin to believe it, even if that message is false.

This situation reminds me of the old story of an elephant that, after years of living chained, when the chains are finally removed, continues to follow the same route it did before, although it could walk wherever it wanted. Our psychological chains are heavier and stronger than those used to chain elephants.

There is yet another possible answer: we are so distracted that we do not pay attention to our own lives. As the well-known saying goes, life is what happens to us when we are busy doing and thinking about something else. If we forget about life, then we are also forgetting about our true self.