Eternal sunshine

It turns out that, to my utter frustration, a lot of people back home are religious or spiritual. And when I say religion when speaking of Bulgaria I mean Eastern Orthodox Christianity, as we do have a traditional religion and believe it or not it's written right there in our Constitution, right after the separation of Church and State part. Opposite to what I thought, many Bulgarian people actually do believe in God and respect the Church (although, as an institution the Bulgarian Orthodox church has been in hiatus), they only do not speak of it. I don't know whether it's considered a personal spiritual matter or it's a remnant of the communist times when speaking of religion and God was equal to dooming yourself and your family to prosecution and abuse. But history has taught us that Christianity has played a major and largely positive role in the development and survival of our nation and people do remember this.

Why I am frustrated then? It is NOT because people are religious and I am mostly a-religious and a bit condescending (I admit) about it. It is because I did not see it. It is because I saw what I wanted to see in my people. They say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder… Well, everything is in the eye of this one beholder here. Apparently, I have an amazingly tough time separating what I want reality to be from what it actually is… I mean, I have been partial to the paradigm that reality is a patchwork of perceptions, but taking it one step further, reality for me seems to be what I want to perceive it to be.

And while all this doesn't seem to bear any direct significance to my life, it makes me wonder if I am consciously or subconsciously deceiving myself like this about other, more important things. I have decided long time ago that if not to others, at least to myself I will always be 100% honest because self-deception gives bad advise. And while it makes reality more bearable, I don't want to wake up one morning in a bed of shattered fantasies.

Which is where another thing I've been thinking about lately comes in. For the largest portion of my life my decisions and actions have been underscored by attempts to live up to some perceived expectations. Only in the last year have I started to not only see that these expectations do not exist, but also to understand that in many cases I have been using them to justify my actions when my motivation has been unclear to me. Or when I did not dare admit what my motivation was. Or simply, when I was afraid to see that there's no one right answer, because apparently life is an equation with too many unknowns and assumptions to have a single ideal solution. Now that I think about it, it all boils down to fear of taking responsibility for my actions. And, oh, how easy it is to blame someone else if things turn out bad!

Only in the last year have I made small but decisive steps to growing out of that deception mode… Just to realize right now (thanks to religion, mind you) how deep that mode runs in my system.

What do I do? Should I start revisiting all my perceptions and values? Should I try to be as non-judgmental and fair as possible to the extent to become a machine? Should I just ignore?

I wonder, to be fair and square, how many times have I neglected the beam in my eye for the mote in my neighbour's?

Heh.