Proportions
It makes sense that when living from a vantage point of either our own meaning or Factor-x, we’ll encounter occasional incidents of the other. What is the difference? It’s a matter of flavor. When your life is about living your own meaning, that’ll be the flavor of your daily life, moment by moment. Yet from time to time, Factor-x will rear its head. It’s also not difficult to see and understand that with such a flavor, your own meaning should be the major influence in whatever you’re doing.
The converse is also true. When you’re living predominantly driven by your Factor-x, that’s then the flavor of your life, day-by-day, moment by moment. From time to time, if in a lesser degree, your own value will surface and make itself known through some of your actions. But predominantly, your Factor-x–driven life won’t serve you, or serve anyone or anything else, because it’s a life built on suffocating yourself. No good will come of it, except on the odd occasions where your own meaning gets through and manifests in an action here and there.
It’s merely a matter of choice standing in your way of living one flavor predominantly over the other.
Once your choice is made in favor of living freely, as a free spirit, and that choice of flavor is set in motion, the journey takes your life in directions where your strengths are. You’ll live freely—mostly. Factor-x will want to disrupt your journey and have an impact on it. But in the main, when you’re living as a free spirit who has chosen the flavor of your journey, you might have less inner conflict and turmoil. The further you travel on this journey, the more sense it will make, the easier it gets, the lighter your spirit gets, and the more your confidence grows. Your life will serve you, and will automatically serve everyone and everything else in your life.
Antithetical Energies
In the section “Inspiration: Emmanuel,” I touch on the origin of my Factor-x, and in the section “Daydreams: Misinterpretation and Undercurrent,” I describe uncovering my own meaning from a twenty-year-old daydream. Our Factor-x and our own meaning is the crux of the material: to introduce to readers the source of our energy. Yes, we get sustenance from the food and fluids we consume. That’s what our physical body lives on, our bodily energy like the fuel used in our motorcars. But the fuel that lets us do what we do with our lives is derived from two antithetical sources: our Factor-x or our own meaning. In the first instance, we look for meaning, and in the second instance, we manifest our own meaning in whatever we do. In the first instance, Factor-x drives us and automatically creates energy toward a quest to disprove that it exists. In the second instance, where we’re manifesting our own meaning because we are free, we’re responsible for creating our own energy. So when free and manifesting our own meaning, and responsible for creating our own energy, we’ll reserve that energy for things important to us, not for things we’re not interested in.
