Imagine an intricate tapestry made of a rich fabric of vibrant colours. It is so huge that it covers the entire wall. You have never seen the wall behind the Tapestry. For you, the wall does not exist. You spend all your time admiring the Tapestry – so beautiful, so breathtaking.

One day you see a tiny hole in the Tapestry – and slowly, it starts to grow. The hole is big enough that you can see the wood-like brown colour of the wall. Your Tapestry is no longer perfect, so you weave another pattern to fill the hole. And then these holes keep appearing more and more frequently, and you are so busy weaving other designs that you no longer enjoy the tapestries.

What if I tell you that this is what we do with our lives? We build a story of how our life should be in our minds. 

I will get a promotion, get a wonderful life, marry a rich, handsome guy, have lovely kids and live happily ever after. 

I will write the next famous app like angry birds, and it will earn me millions, and I will never have to work again.

I will win a lottery and become the richest man in the world and be happy.

It never quite works out as the story in our head. For starters, your car may decide to break down in the morning, or your heater broke down, and you have to fix it. Or your friend marries a rich guy. So a hole appears in the story of our lives, and we fill it up with other stories. We are so uncomfortable with holes that we have a back up ready if a spot does appear – we stuff the backup plan to cover the gap.

Let’s go back to the Tapestry on the wall for a second – what if one day you got so tired of filling up the holes that you give up. You let the gaps appear, and you do not fill them up. Your wonderful Tapestry dissolves right in front of your eyes. You weep as you see it decaying. But, then you see that there is a door in the wall. The Tapestry had been preventing you from seeing the door. 

You open the door and enter inside to find an entire room filled with beautiful tapestries. Even more importantly, you do not feel the need to fill the holes in them anymore because you still see the beauty.

Our lives are the same way – we are so busy building stories that we never discover the wonderful treasure that waits for us behind the stories. It is like Tolle says in his book – ‘Power Of Now’, we are all like beggars sitting on a treasure chest who never look inside it. 

What is that treasure? What is the door hidden behind? Our true self – unchanging self, the self that watches the story unfold without becoming the story. The screen on which the story unfolds does not care about the story – it exists. Are you ready to not fill the gaps anymore?