Complete

"It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself." - Betty Friedan

it is amazing how much time we spend searching for a person to make us whole. If we are a quiet person we are attracted to someone who is a social butterfly. If we are a couch potato we are attracted to someone athletic. Typically when we fall in love with someone we are attracted by some trait they have that we don't have but highly value. We think that if we hang around someone with that trait, it will somehow rub off on us. It will fill the hole inside and make us complete. Yet apparently when people divorce, it is very often the trait that attracted the person in the first place that has been turned around into a negative and caused them to want to leave.

Magazines that tell us every little detail about the lives of celebrities are huge sellers. It is as though our own lives are so dull that we would rather read about Brad and Angelina and how they raise their kids, among other things. We want to hear about their lives because their lives seem so much more interesting than ours do. We want to live like them. We want to live through them. So we don't spend enough time thinking about our own lives and how to improve them.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. Just as it is easier to blame someone else than to own up to your own mistakes. We resist taking responsibility for the quality of our lives. We have been taught that outside people and circumstances are what controls us. We have been taught to look outside ourselves for both problems and their solutions. We have been taught to do what we are told. But that is not how we become complete. Becoming complete requires a focus on ourselves and what we can do with our own lives to learn and grow and enjoy our world. It is a process; there are no quick fixes.