New Chances, New Opportunities

Hello. As promised, I have returned with more thoughts for us to share on Happiness.

Yesterday I left you with a rather emphatic statement saying, among other things, that - 'We are all deserving of Happiness'. I wrote it in capital letters. I did so to emphasise the depth of my belief that we all truly deserve to be Happy. In addition, it is indeed a 'capital' statement also deserving of capital letters.

Many people however are not of this view.

For example, it is often said that ultimately we are the engineers or creators of our own misery and thus do not deserve to be Happy in most instances.

The thinking behind this is that basically we must stop whining, accept and learn to live with our near permanent state of unhappiness because we created it for ourselves by making wrong choices in our lives etc.

One saying that usually accompanies such thinking is - 'once you have made your bed - you must lie in it', period!

I find this saying and the thinking behind it, a bit too grim, way too uncompromising. More importantly I believe that such statements, without some qualification, are generally problematic. I will try now to demonstrate why I think it is so in our particular context.

Consider this for a moment: Many of us may often 'make our beds' under conditions which are not always the best. That is, under conditions that may be far from optimum. What if, for example, through no fault of ours we were out of sorts or compromised in some other way while making said bed? What if at the time we only had access to the wrong kind of sheets and pillow cases when we were making our metaphorical bed? Who is to say?

I'll take it a step further.

Who says we cannot re-make our beds? And who says we cannot make other beds if needs must?

Simply put, the fact that people voluntarily or involuntarily make wrong choices does not mean that they should not be given second, third or even fourth or more chances to put things right or make things better!

Living is all about learning. Life is indeed a learning curve and the fact that we may get it wrong sometimes, or veer off the curve on occasion should not deny us our right to get back on track and try and fix things!

Life is not a stagnant constant. Neither is it a stagnant concept. Life is motion and motion involves movement and change. Why then as part of this movement and change can we not put our heads together, draw from our experiences and seek new chances and opportunities to be truly Happy? In truth there is absolutely nothing in the world preventing us from doing this and that is exactly what we aim to do!

People are certainly not unchanging absolutes. We must therefore try to refrain from seeing each other as absolutes. To deal in absolutes is to embrace rigidity and rigidity is often an enemy of Happiness and life in general which are necessarily flexible. Ancient Chinese wisdom holds that - 'It is the living leaf which is soft and pliant but it is the dead leaf which is hard and rigid'. I guess there is a lesson here for us all.

Oftentimes in our daily lives we come across such seemingly 'absolute' general statements which really do not hold up in the face of some scrutiny. It's a bit like the saying that - 'The devil you know is better than the Angel you don't'! I've actually heard this told to a lady friend of mine by her mentor when she was trying to get out of an abusive relationship.

She was told it could be worse out there and was thus better off staying put to be further abused by this known 'devil' whose familiarity had suddenly become a positive attribute in the eyes of this so-called mentor! Imagine that! This I knew then was not quite right since by definition alone an Angel is ALWAYS better than a devil whether he or she is known to us or not, period! So that's another example of so-called general words of wisdom which we must at times take with a barrel or two of salt.

All said - I believe it is always important that we assure ourselves that despite the fact that we may not have always 'made our beds' properly at a given time, we can always remake them in our bid to seek new chances and opportunities to be Happy.

Speaking of 'generalities' I know that so far we have only been talking about Happiness or unhappiness in general terms as well. In this case it's not a bad thing. This is because it is this general context that will soon give us the framework for us to step into the more complex arena of specific situations or conditions of Happiness and unhappiness. It's early days yet and we will soon, no doubt, find ourselves dealing with specifics and what we perceive to be the way forward in given situations.

I will leave you with this for now and wish us all the very best in our quest to be Happy.

I shall return.

Hasta la Vista.