Each of Us Lives in a World of Our Own

As I was contemplating the relationship of my parents and my own way of thinking, as a result of being raised by them, I saw a vision of how their worlds have always been different.

My father believed that one must suffer to earn money and to be a respectable person overall. One must always work on earning more money and educating oneself. One must never simply lay around enjoying oneself in pure pleasure. To get anything in life, one must suffer working for it, or at least suffer for not having been able to work for it. Everything must be paid in suffering.

My mother however, has been raised to enjoy pleasure. She earned a descent living, much more than my father, by doing something she loved, teaching kids at a school.

My father always looked at her as though she was lucky, unfairly lucky and even quite lazy and undereducated, because she did not suffer for her earnings and did not forego pleasure for ever more self-education. Especially towards the end of his life, the bitterness towards my mother grew, which facilitated my vision.

In my vision, the world my father lived in consisted of suffering and my mother was not following the rules of his universe. She did not pay with suffering. She enjoyed life and she made a living off it, too. She did not feel the need to keep educating herself to extreme levels. She enjoyed dropping on the couch after work, watching TV shows, my father condemned as simple and cheap.

My mother, in her love of pleasure and joy of simple things, did not see his suffering and so lived in her own word, not understanding his complaints, his dissatisfaction with himself and her ridiculous pleasure from life. She was actually pretty oblivious of his suffering and his world in general.

So they shared a lifetime together, as if from two different universes, but in the same living space, sharing the same bed and the same children. In no way am I complaining about this. On the contrary, I am glad to have seen this vision. As I see it, we all live in worlds, or even universes of our own.

Even more so, with our thoughts and desires, we bend the fabric of our fabricated universes and we create the events and circumstances, that let us experience our thoughts and desires fed back to us. We all stew in our own juices, so to speak.