Disclaimer: Trying out a more direct style of writing. Ideas from this passage come from Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.

The agreements we have with ourselves are everything.

Once upon a time, we woke up and were thrust into an unfamiliar world. There, we were rewarded for what our elders deemed “good”, and punished for what they deemed “bad”. We learnt languages and morals, ethics and religion – not because we asked for it, but because we couldn’t.

Along the way, we made agreements with ourselves. Agreements that shaped the way we saw ourselves in the world. One agreement might have been, I’m ugly, because a fellow classmate sneered at our clothing. Another agreement might’ve been, I’m poor, because we ate differently to others. And another, more terrible agreement might’ve been, I’m worthless, because someone told us so.

And over time, we’ve come to worship our agreements, no matter how terrible. Whenever something questions our agreements, we feel a funny feeling in our solar plexus and it’s called fear. Breaking our agreements makes us feel unsafe, because we’ve constructed our lives around them. And so, we go around carrying around beliefs about ourselves that are untrue and irrational, for the sake of feeling grounded. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

Thus, the biggest fear humans have is to be alive. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express who we really are.

All of humanity is searching for something, whether it be truth, justice or beauty. We keep searching and searching, but there is nothing to find. Everything is within us – for the agreements we have in our minds leave no room for the truth. We live in a fog that is not even real. We see the world through a filter; and sometimes, this filter is a horror lens. And so, some of us live in a living hell.

The agreements we have with ourselves are everything – for in a way, we’re all living in a dream. What our dream looks like, is up to us.