Have you ever noticed how some things in your life seem to be simply the way the world is made? That is how it is done. That is what is right. That is how it has always been. We rarely ask where this obviousness came from.
Yet every “that is how it is” has an author. Not an abstract one — a specific one. Someone once told a story about how one ought to live, work, raise children, strive — and told it so convincingly that we stopped hearing a story in it. It became the background. The air. Reality.
More often than not, these stories carry the view of those who benefit from your seeing things exactly that way. The governing group — in a family, in a company, in a country — does not give you orders. It tells you stories. And you complete the rest yourself, certain that the conclusion is your own.
There is a subtlety here that held me up for a long time. You cannot destroy what was never built. These frames are not walls. They are stage sets. And the work is not to smash them furiously, but to see one day that there is no load-bearing structure behind them. Only someone’s old plot that you agreed to treat as your own.
Dispelling the illusion of the real is not rebellion. It is sobriety.
Which of your “obvious truths” is in fact someone’s convenient story?