Mission 4: Make Life a Theme Park
- kittyIsBadDog
- Jan 7
- 7 min read
Topic of post:
How to get un-stuck.
How to use good philosophies to build a foundation for your life that can allow you to move through it with ease.
Life is a theme park. Your theme park.
It’s easy to get stuck. To care and love something so deeply that you can’t move past it. To crave an addictive substance with all of your being, both body and mind. Or even just getting stuck in a boring routine or behind a depressive wall where happiness is just out of reach.
One of the tricks I’ve used to break out of mental loops/traps is to picture my life as a theme park. Every experience is a new ride. Some are scary. Some are exciting and fun. Some are boring and some sad. Some you just want to keep riding over and over again. That inner kid screaming with excitement when the attendant tells you that you can stay on the ride.
The ultimate truth is that you can only ride any one thing at any time.
If life is meant to be lived and made the most of, sometimes the best and hardest thing we can do is get off a ride so we can create the space to try another. Maybe someone’s died and it’s hard to let your life move on. Maybe you’re in a negative relationship but you love them with all of you. Maybe you’re stuck in a job that undervalues your talent or isn’t allowing you to grow. Maybe you’ve got a bad habit or addiction you can’t seem to kick.
What’s helped me in the most trying of times is to visualize the theme park of my life. Imagining all my experiences as different rides in that park. I then focus on the ride I’m currently on that's consuming me. When I developed this mindset the ride was opiate addiction, but it can be anything you're going through. I imagine that ride coming to a stop and the bar releasing me. I stand up and walk back out to the theme park to look around and see what’s next, all with the feeling of being a kid again.
Opiates were better than any other single experience. There's a reason they are addictive psychologically. They make you feel... Fantastic. That's the trade that gets people into addiction. At first you trade a little of your time for the high. Easy... they're fantastic. Then you start trading all of your extra income. Easy, it was extra and compared to that feeling... Wow. Then you start replacing other experiences with getting high. A night snorting a pill is a better high than a night at a bar with friends. Then you start selling your stuff to support the habit. I mean really, who needs a TV or electricity and running water when you're floating through the ether!? Then someone convinces you that needles are better. Within context they're not wrong...
It's a road that leads to prison or death, often times both. The point to this is you're trading individual things because opiates outweighs them when one on one. You don't see it as a collection of things. By the end I had traded my entire life, piece by piece, for an addiction. Once I saw it as a collection of trades all for one thing, one experience... My life became more valuable than my addiction. I wanted a future filled with many experiences, all the experiences, instead of just one that's forever repeated.
How I was able to move on was to envision my life as that theme park. To imagine addiction as being just one ride I'm stuck on and to crave what the rest of my life may be. To have all the experiences instead of looping the same one. I had done addiction. I had ridden that ride into the ground. I saw friends die. I saw myself become so lost all I was was a need to not feel sick. I knew what the ride of opiates was and knew I could always come back to it if the rest of the theme park didn't work out. I needed to know what else was out there. I needed to live.
So I tried crack cocaine.
Just kidding. I started experiencing everything I could. Living in the moment and asking myself how everything made me feel. To fully embrace the taste of a strawberry and feel the air hit my face as I drove with the windows down in my car. To enjoy my thoughts and head space again. To play disc golf & putt putt. To go to concerts & festies again. To try anything I could just to experience it. Every experience was a new ride in the theme park of my life and I wanted to ride them all.
If only I had known this mental hack in my younger years... I could have saved myself so much heartbreak. As I said in the first post: I was a hopeless romantic, and a severe case. Forever trapped in the belief that my pain made old relationships real. That by carrying it my love was real. The scariest thought to me was that I would heal and feel nothing. After all, the opposite of love isn't hate - it's indifference. If I couldn't have love then at least I could keep the bond alive in the hate & pain I felt. Toxic much? I know, I know... now. Had I developed this philosophy of life sooner I could have honored my past relationships while being eager to move on and make new connections. To stop clinging on and learn to let go. To let my life show me what's out there instead of me trying to force it to be something I now see it could never have been.
This mental hack works wonders for me. Being able to visualize yourself releasing from the harness of what holds you and walking to an exciting and bright future full of adventure & fun allows you do just that. This also helps because it focuses in on the idea that the hard experience that's trapping you isn’t your life- it’s just the ride you’re currently on. Your life is the flat, stable, and full of wonder theme park the ride sits on… you’ve just been on that same ride so long that you’ve forgotten there’s more out there.
My life is a theme park and I plan on riding every ride I can before my time is up.
How this helps:
If it can get me off of one of the most addictive substances in the world... it can do anything. Tired of being a fatty? Get off the ride and move onto another experience. Tired of being skinny? Go try some new foods and see how you feel! Stuck in your job? There's a sea of opportunity out there just waiting to be explored. So often we tie our identities to our current states of being. To being an addict. To living a depressing life. We are scared that if we let go we can never get it back.
You are so much more than who you are in this moment. You are a collection of your past, present, and future. When you do it right you can live a life that's full and diverse. To know how it feels to live in excess as well as in balance. To understand all your pain and use it to create a depth of meaning in your happiness. Life is best when explored instead of clung onto.
Extra Credit:
You can also wrap this same concept in a way that's unique to you! Don't like a theme park but love food? What about books or movies? Getting stuck is like eating the same flavor, reading the same book, or watching the same movie over and over again. It might be amazing. It's probably your comfort zone. However, when that thing takes over your life... it chokes out any other experience you can have. It stops you from growth. From being anything more than you currently are. You have to get off the ride, stop choosing the same meal, put down the book, & turn off the movie before you can move on and see what else is out there.
Find what metaphor fits your life and see your habits as just one small part of your overall existence. Feel free to leave a comment & tell us what worked for you!
*If you are currently addicted and want to move past it - this song became my mantra. There's times I would listen to it on repeat until the urge passed. Growth is not linear, no matter how many addiction recovery programs try to make it so. I found it better to step myself down. Try to not use, but when the urge hit and I couldn't move past it, to use the same dose or less than the time before. Stretch out how often I use to span longer and longer intervals. Multiple times a day with amounts that could kill a horse became a wake up & go to bed routine with enough to knock the edge off & feel a little good. That turned into every other day which turned into a weekend thing which turned into being able to just not. Instead of going cold turkey with a hard stop I just stopped pressing the gas and kinda let myself coast to a stopped position. I stopped framing my choices as success/relapse. That idea is so toxic. It puts yourself on a tightrope and when you fall, you fall hard. The same can be said for diets. It's why the failure rate for both is so high. Instead, I let myself breathe and framed it as just getting off a ride so I can experience the rest of the theme park. I pinned any other philosophy I could to that to reinforce it; including listening to this song on repeat:
You're not alone.
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