Waking up refreshed, we get ready to move into a new day. Each day is a new beginning, a chance to review, reset, and take steps to get closer to where we would like to be.
Then the day starts to happen. Sometimes there are things that you enjoy, and often there are things that you don’t. Before you know it, the optimism of the morning is a distant memory and you are back in the routine of fighting and struggling just to keep it together.
Any thoughts of thriving are out the window.
Imposing restrictions on what it takes for us to feel joy can be disheartening. If you depend on others to act a certain way in order for you to be happy, then you have lost control of the one thing in life you have power over – your inner state of being.
There are too many variables in the world to allow your inner state to be determined by external forces. The stock market goes up, millions are happy. The stock market goes down, millions are annoyed.
The stock market crashes, untold numbers of people are distraught, suicidal, and desperate. Yet because everything in life is cyclical, we know that these patterns will invariably repeat.
What goes up will come down.
Attaching your very identity to something over which you have no control is a recipe for unhappiness. If you live with someone and you need them to act a certain way before you can be joyful, then you will live a life of dissatisfaction. You are no longer the architect, free to design a life you choose.
If you can’t like yourself until someone else likes you, what a torturous existence this will be. You spend 100% of your time in this world with yourself. If you don’t like who you are, then it is going to be an unpleasant life indeed.
Being alone and allowing your thoughts to surface is important. That way you can determine exactly where you have given your power away.
If it is rainy outside and it makes you feel miserable, then the skies have control over you. Appreciate that without rain, your food won’t grow and you will die. It’s a beautiful thing that nature does what she needs to do to take care of us.
When someone cuts you off in traffic or gives you the finger and it makes you angry, then people in cars who you don’t even know control your emotions. They may be angry too, so now everyone can go out there and be rude and angry at the same time. Misery does love company.
Needing to have a certain job, or to be with a specific person, or to live in one area before you can find happiness robs you of the joy that you could be living instead.
It all comes down to you being happy with you. This seems so simple, and yet it is the most important thing to get right.
Looking in the mirror and being upset with what you see is not being loving to you. Envying what other people have and not appreciating everything that is in your life is a waste of limited time.
Expecting people to be exactly as you think they should be doesn’t allow others to live their own lives as they choose. It is narcissistic and delusional to expect that you will find happiness when things outside of you line up exactly as you demand.
It’s a game of disappointment. Things will never be the way you think they should be, because you will never know the way they are supposed to be.
There is something magical and miraculous about this world, the way everything works perfectly to support our very existence. The air is the perfect combination of gases that keep us alive. Any change in its composition could kill all of us instantly. There is food, water, and all the tools we need to build shelters. Everything that we need is here.
The rotation of the earth is rhythmical and smooth, and gravity keeps us firmly standing where we are. Any slight deviation from this path by the earth would instantly be catastrophic.
There are so many things that go on outside of our limited ability to even understand them that there is no sanity in expecting that our wills should be realized in any capacity at any time.
We can barely take care of ourselves properly let alone try to manage an entire world.
Keep your power where you have control. The only place that exists lies inside of you.