Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

David Whyte
About This Quote

One of the biggest problems in our world is the notion that it’s OK to make up your own reality based on feelings. To do this, people try to eliminate complexity from life. They don’t want to feel any uncertainty, because they make up their own reality and then they don’t have to face their emotions. They just hide their emotions with drugs, alcohol or sex.

However, this doesn’t work. For one thing, you can’t eliminate all complexity from a situation without completely rewriting the situation. For example, if you try having been married for twenty years and been divorced twice before that and now you’re trying to have a relationship based on those experiences.

You have eliminated the complexity of your first marriage and your divorce from those experiences so you can move forward with your new marriage as if nothing had happened except your first marriage ended. But someone else who has never been married will see that as a totally different situation and will be more confused by it than you are – because he or she has no idea of the first marriage.

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