The Highway of life

Travelling the world is one of my favourite things to do. I love experiencing new cultures, different ways of living/doing things and find that travelling opens my mind to the variety of experiences available to us in this world. There are many similarities between travelling the physical world and travelling the emotional inner landscape that we all experience.

Emotions

I couldn’t find an image to accurately represent my idea so I drew my own one – please excuse the crude representation but it does the job. 🙂 When we venture out of our comfort zone and get onto the highway of life, we gain access to all sorts of experiences. Good, bad and downright ugly – they are all there waiting to be explored. There will be some places/emotions that we will wish we hadn’t visited – that curry in Delhi that made me ill could well be likened to visiting the place of rejection. Not great but a lesson emerges each time: don’t eat curry at that restaurant again or don’t ask that particular person for a favour again. Each time, whether the experience is joyous or disastrous, we will be more experienced for it. We also learn something about how ourselves – how we deal with the experiences we go through.

Perspective on life experiences make all the difference

Experiences don’t have to break us if we see them in the right perspective and never personalise an experience as being all our fault. For example, travel along the highway of life and sooner or later you will arrive in the place called “Failure”. A crappy little town that leave many in a state of panic. When you look at failure as a lesson, a way not to do something in the future rather than seeing yourself as a failure, the crappy little town loses it’s influence.

Your true potential

Many mistakenly believe that if they avoid the highway of life (stay single, never venture out, take the humdrum job, never take a risk…) that they will lead a safer life. It might be safer on some levels but you will never blossom. How can you know what you are truly capable of, what your full potential is, if you never get stuck in? Getting on to the highway of life takes a little bravery but you will be amongst many others visiting the emotional towns and cities of life.

At any one time on any given day there will be hoards visiting each of the ’emotional towns’ listed in my drawing above. You can draw your own highway – the most important thing is that you are experiencing all the emotions. Instead of resisting, accept that life has it’s ups and downs, it’s fun and shitty towns (did you see what I did there??  😉   )

Welcome to the human race, the ebbs and flows, the highs and lows. Yep – it’s called Life.

Mandy X

Author: Mandy Kloppers

Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.