Unhappiness: Poison for Self-love

 

Willie Nelson: “We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.”

Whole lot of unhappiness is born of comparing your situation to others. It's your short-cut to instant unhappiness. By instinct we compare ourselves to those better off while overlooking millions of unfortunates.

Dostoevsky: “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”

Unhappiness is the state of forgetting primarily yourself for what you are. We simply allow unhappiness to sink over us. It's a symptom of self-loathing instead of what others have done to you.

Marcus Brigstocke: “I realized that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.”

You must be feeling that all the preachy talk lays too much emphasis on how to be happy. Well then, we take a bit different route. We can achieve better results by handling unhappiness.

Enjoy being the frog king in a shit hole; it's better than being a slave in heaven. It directly cuts on the pool of unhappiness, brightening your chances of loving primarily yourself and loving all as a consequence. It’s all the more important because unhappiness straightaway stabs at your intrinsic loving nature. The challenge here is to stab unhappiness in a nonviolent way. There is a methodology.

Apart from all the shit happening around, life is supposed to be a big, fat and interesting book. Let it be an exciting story, not because others applaud it, but basically because you own it, write it and enjoy it. Don't die every moment to see appreciation in the eyes of those around. If that is the expectation, then forget it. It won't happen. People around you will give you more reasons to be sad rather be happy. Others will prefer to see your miserable face instead of ever-grinning, full of joy joker. Not because they are sadistic in nature, just that it helps them in somehow digesting their own miseries. So at least don't hold any expectation on that front.

The appreciation has to come basically from within you. So let it be a very fat book of your follies and little, little triumphs. Let there be unending trails of anecdotes that make you the champion of your small world. Forget about being a world champion. This world is as small as you in comparison to the cosmos. Both are puny. Laugh at it, if it laughs at you. Quite interestingly, this world has limitations, but not you. There are no limitations on you to extend the world within, inside your smallness of routine life, tiny errands, short walks, little losses, tiny gains and stable-unstable relations.

Live more. Like a frog that just jumped into the murky, muddy, mossy green puddle of water. This little puddle itself won't be there after a week. Summers are unsparing. It's boiling. But does it stop the frog king from walloping and taking fantastic breaststrokes in the filthy water? Does it stop the love-lorn fella from croaking dandily and woo the lady of its dream? It doesn't because it's just living in a lifeful 'consciousness', not 'self-consciousness' like we humans who impose 'self' on natural 'consciousness' so heavily to make life a burden.

'Ego' is the feeling of 'I am'. 'I' overshadows 'am', the state of 'just being', of 'consciousness', of living fully, of gliding in the present without the burden of past and worries of future. Nurture 'am-ness'. Water it. It will prosper. Consciousness will spread healthily as you nurture am-ness. Unburden the enjoyment of life from the heavyweight of 'I' and woo your mistress, the life, even in the dirtiest waters like the king of the puddle, the frog. Just 'be'.

Write more chapters in the book of your life. Not as 'I' but by 'being' there. More the chapters, the better it is! Don't bother if these are just scribbled with amateur verve. It's your creation, and as a parent you will hardly be judgmental about it. If a particular chapter goes stale, wind it up and save your book from getting boring. Start a new chapter. We are the writers of the book of life. Keep it interesting! 

Life turns interesting, not because there are exciting things around. It’s interesting if you ‘find’ it interesting. The stage is lying neutral for anyone around. How you see it and how you decide to jump on it with your own antics, playing the protagonist of your life, is all that matters.

Comparison: The Enemy of your Loving Self

A lot many of us are unhappy—and naturally less loving—because of the perpetual feeling of loss and failure. Well, a lot of it has to do with our comparison of our situation and standing with others instead of the actual placement of things. Looking at the brighter suns, we get blinded and go into low self-esteem and self-reproach. It makes us terribly discontented and unhappy. To make it still scarier, it’s the worst diagnosis for one’s loving self.

Lyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.”

We have this terrible propensity to add to the weight of sadness and pain inside us. And the simplest mode of adding to our woes is unnecessarily comparing us to others. By prioritizing comparison over your uninfluenced action, you surrender a part of your free will. It is a vital resource. You just jab your own confidence by bruising your self-love. A detached attitude gives you freedom. Comparison basically is a bug that sickens your spirits. Long before you beat others, you berate your own self. You get into sickened imaginations and enter a whirlpool of impracticality.

Comparison is the most irksome short-cut to unhappiness. Almost 90% of the time, we are comparing ourselves with people better placed than us. No wonder a crippling feeling of inadequacy sinks in. Under the glorious sun of their hyper-achievement, you writhe with your somewhat real, but majority of imagined, inadequacies.

Well, the imperious combo of compare and compete beats the hell out of our compassionate self. I am not saying don't compete. Do it with all your capability. But remove the indoctrinated vice of comparison from it. All we can do is to compare our former self with the present one to see the degree of change. Be your own comparison.

Gerald Jampolsky: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.”

So walk slowly, look within, and reach your goal with a smile; you will beat the fastest runner. Qualitatively I mean, since walking to the goal-post with a lovely smile and loadful of loving self makes you the real winner. We just need to change the evaluation of victory. The system may take a generation to bring out such qualitative changes; meanwhile, we can begin with the self.

The moment you grasp the meaning and purpose of your life, you become indispensable for the scheme of things around. You become a requirement for this whole universe. You are no longer a burden for this cosmos to drag on. You just don’t survive accidentally. Yours becomes a planned journey, shaping and reshaping the environment not just for meeting your end, but also carrying the effects that go onto touch many lives around.

The sea cannot survive without its tiny drop. Suppose a drop goes missing, the sea gets a hole in its heart and it just cannot afford to miss its drop. Similarly, this universe cannot sustain the hole left by you. It sustains by you as much as you sustain by it. The only condition being that you live consciously, that you know what you are doing, that you pick an option only after deliberating over it. In this manner you bring full justice to your consciousness.

From chance living to well-meant steps purposeful for the self and the larger humanity, all it takes is a small realization. Just look back and see the trail of decisions you have taken in life. How many of these were taken consciously, you being fully aware of the range of options? How many of these were just pushed on you by the random happenings and chance occurrences?

Unfortunately, a vast majority of our options are born of random throws by chance factors and we just grabbing some involuntarily. And a life dictated by uncalculated, random options and opportunities, hits and mis-hits ends in a confusing travel across the endless twists, turns, U-turns and back outs from dead ended streets like in the puzzle game. We get wasted and wearied in endless turns, re-turns and U-turns, always pushed on by the random factors that happen to spin out of the lot. No wonder, even after travelling a whole lifetime, we are still near the point of start. We feel we haven’t done anything at all. It’s the puzzling zigzag. It cannot be called a path leading to your destiny.

Across the serpentine criss-crossing and entangled turns of random paths and choices, there are most suitable paths laid out for all of us. All we need to do is to start living consciously. Don’t allow generalizations drawn out of comparison of your situation with others to be your guiding principle. Walk slowly but mindfully. You may see others hurtling fast on the racetrack around you, raising dust, crashing into sidelines, shouting with trophies at some corners, but mind you, no journey is complete and meaningful if one doesn’t feel contentment at the end. No journey across the blizzard of accidental turns can result in peace that you are looking for at the end of the day.

So plan your journey even if it means walking slowly. You can even delay your onslaught on the exams or other important tasks of life by a year if you decide to go into self reflection, weighing your abilities and limitations, all this while keeping a close look at the competition. It’s better to watch from a distance first. It’s better to walk slowly if you know what you are doing.

Mindless dash towards the finish line has no meaning at all. Stop if you have been running. Pause if you have been mindlessly allowing yourself to be held by the collar by the monster called life. Sit down if you have been standing for too long. And then look around and think. Look at the zigzag pattern of your senseless run so far. The actual distance covered will surely be very short.

Walk slowly like a wise man. A wise man walking slowly will still beat a reckless sprinter at the end of the day. It’s better to walk slowly to the finish-line, with your breath still under control, your legs still able to carry you. The end becomes meaningful, preparing you for the next journey. Running out of breath to the end line, and crashing straightaway has no meaning. This is no victory. This is not the destination. It’s not meeting the goal. It simply means collapsing. The whole journey turns meaningless.

Victory means being able to smile after reaching the destination. So stop, look back, see the mindless work and the stampede, pause for a moment, look ahead and walk to your sweet goal with a smile on your lips. You become a winner instantly.