What would you do if you were a God?
Feel free to replace “A God” with “The God”, “a Goddess” or just with “an omnipotent plate of atheist pasta”.
Whatever deity fits your beliefs, it doesn’t matter. The point is: What would you do?
I bet your first weeks would be absolutely amazing.
You could wake up every single day and do all the things which right now, are not possible for you.
The things you don’t have enough money for. The things you can’t do because your body isn’t strong enough, big enough, or lacks the body parts for. The things you can’t do because you’re not Harry Frikkin’ Potter. I bet you’d do them all.
And once you’d get tired of them, you’d come up with a billion more things you have never done before, and start doing those.
But after a few weeks, years, even centuries of doing that, what’s next?
What if you’ve done everything you could ever dream of a gazillion times…and you still have an eternity of your immortal lifetime to spend?
Wouldn’t life start to lose its fun a bit?
How Less Fun Is Sometimes More Fun
Imagine for a moment that you truly were an omnipotent plate of spaghetti. And after doing everything a spaghetti could dream of, you now had to spend the rest of eternity completely bored out of your bolognaise…
How could you use your pasta powers, to make things more interesting?
The surprising answer is: By creating limitations that make things harder for you.
It sounds odd, but it makes a lot of sense.
When I was a teenager, I stayed out all night. I stayed at every party way past its peak. Sometimes until the break of dawn. More often, until the break of noon.
And because of that, I ended each party with the feeling of the pleasure “being over”. Wondering how I could find a way to get it back on this new day.
One of my friends on the other hand, had a very strict curfew. If he wasn’t home by midnight, he’d get in big trouble. So he always had to leave when things were just getting interesting.
One night I asked him if he didn’t feel bad about that.
And he replied “Not at all. Yes, in the moment, I wish that I could stay. But I leave every party on a high note. I never see the fun end. And I really make the most of every minute that I’m there. So even the parties you find boring, I stay excited about for weeks after. ”
The Limitations of Creating Limitations
You may have experienced the fun of limitations yourself already. For example, there may have been a certain activity you were doing a lot, until it got a bit less interesting. So you decided to spice things up a bit. “What if I put on a blindfold this time? What if I try it in public? What if I try it without hands and use only my tongue today?”
You already know what I’m talking about of course. Indeed: playing guitar.
But you can apply this to any other hobby or skill: Adding certain limitations, make you discover the joy of it in a completely new way.
Now… if you were a God, and you wanted to create some fun limitations for yourself to make your eternal life more interesting, you’d have 1 big problem:
You are omnipotent.
So whatever limitations you’d create for yourself, deep down, you’d always know that you could just remove them at the snap of your fingers.
To fix that problem, you’d have to make sure you wouldn’t know about this. The best way to do that, is to remove every memory of who you truly are.
Of course, you’d eventually want to find out again. So in true Hansel and Gretel style, you’d have to leave yourself some breadcrumbs to lead yourself back to…ehm … yourself.
How This Perspective Can Make Your Life More Awesome
I was recently going over a lot of the major social events in my life with a therapist, especially the ones that hurt me, or where I wasn’t doing the right thing. And I started to see those events as being such breadcrumbs.
A lot of the things that hurt me, were “challenges” which, by facing them, each brought me one step closer to unconditional love. They didn’t happen “to me”. They happened “for me”. They showed me the way to love. And keep showing me the way to deeper, more honest forms of it.
Initially, I just found it an exciting perspective to play around with:
What if we’re dropped in this world at a certain distance from who we truly are, and from true love. Each one of us with our own set of limitations, challenges and obstacles. Which were chosen as a way to make “life more interesting”. But at the same time, function as breadcrumbs to lead you home. Home to that love. Home to what you truly are underneath the layers of culture, trauma and social conditioning. Maybe even home to whatever you see as God.
What if that’s the riddle we’re all here to solve in this lifetime?
Each one of us a different riddle, but with the same answer. Because there’s infinite ways for a God to play this game.
- Some of us start off with unhealthy examples of love from their parents
- Some of us start with a bigger dose of shame than others
- Some of us start in a situation where they have to focus so hard on survival it’s all they can think about
- Some of us are born with a lack of empathy, and a penchant for antisocial behavior
- Some of us have trouble expressing ourselves and being understood
- Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.
But what if God was every one of us, trying to make his way home?
Regardless of whether it’s true or not, I’ve been letting this idea exist in my reality for a while. And I’ve found it to be powerful in many different ways:
Benefit 1:
It creates an empowering context for your challenges and struggles. Whatever you are going through. You can see it as a breadcrumb back home. If you have the courage to face this situation and truly learn from it, it will always bring you one step closer to love.
Benefit 2:
It makes you more compassionate towards other people. When somebody does something shitty, you can remind yourself “Oh, that’s part of the riddle they still have to solve. “ It doesn’t make you like what they’re doing, but it helps you forgive them. Because you know it’s part of their own path towards love.
Benefit 3:
You don’t get stuck in “What If?” thinking or making excuses for yourself. Whatever the limitations of your life currently are: You can see that they are the things that make your life interesting. Because being omnipotent would be a lot more boring than this.
Benefit 4:
It stops you from judging others. Because when you look at someone engaging in destructive behavior, or failing to learn from their mistakes, you can say: “Wow, they’re playing hard mode. They got dropped way further from home than me. And my life has already been hard at times. So even if I disagree with their behavior, I have mad respect for the hardships they’re dealing with.”
Benefit 5:
Next time you get stuck in traffic, lose your WiFi signal or discover you’re out of toilet paper when it’s already too late: Remind yourself that if you were an immortal God with infinite magic powers, yes… This is the exact situation you’d chose to create for yourself… To make things more fun ;-). So enjoy!