Happiness Is Easy

When You Eliminate "Trying". 

After all, why do we strive for anything? Because we think it will make us happy.  What might happen if we eliminated the striving?  What if we could just be happy without having to attach our happiness to a person, place, activity, accomplishment, job, income, etc.?  What a relief that would be.  

Eliminate the middle man of trying.  He's a trying guy anyway.  When we fall short, he beats us up, and when we accomplish our goals, he says it's not enough.  He's just never happy, so we aren't either.  Let's stop trying to please some arbitrary judge that relies on bench marks. .

As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker, "there is no "try" young Skywalker; there is only DO."

Let's do this thing.  .  Let's leave "trying" behind.  Let's just be happy

Anger

 Anger has a lot of power.  

We hate to have it directed against us.  It has the power to frighten, and we often feel diminished by its sting.  Feeling the wrath of another can be a blow to self esteem.  It can take time to piece together an ego shattered by anger.

Our own anger is equally powerful.  We feel it build within us until it bursts like a bomb on the target of our ire. Sometimes our anger stirs us to the point where everything we come in contact with feels our frenzied energy.  If we cling to our anger for too long it starts to draw towards us similar energy, like annoyed drivers, angry, whining people, or unpleasant experiences.  We lock our keys in the car or spill our coffee.  We get angrier.  It can be satisfying to let our anger out, but that has consequences. 

In Aikido we're taught that an attacker attacks because they are out of balance.  We, too, are out of balance when our anger causes us to attack another, kick a chair that got in the way, or get down on ourselves. We're not perfect, we're human, we get angry;  but being out of balance is one of the quickest ways to fall down. Remembering that can often be helpful in restoring ourselves to a more comfortable frame of mind. 

Be angry, let it out, and let it go.  

Breath.

 

BOP

In some business site I read about BOP: Basic Operating Procedure or something like that.  The idea is that you figure out what you want your business to be about.  This isn't a mission statement or a vision statement.  The way I interpreted it is it's a statement that identifies what YOU want to get out of your business.  For example, Apple's BOP is "we make really cool interesting stuff that make us a lot of money."  Now that's a BOP that would wake me up in the morning and send me happily to work.  I wondered what my BOP is, not just in my business, but in my life.  It's worth pondering. 

Cross Purposes

When someone is cross with us, it can make us rethink who we are.  We start from feeling cross ourselves,  justifying ourselves for the annoyance we caused.  We defend our actions and we defame the person who objected to them. 

Then we turn our thoughts to wanting to fix whatever we did.  We begin to regret our actions and start feeling bad about ourselves. How can we make up for our shortcomings?

Now, instead of being cross, we discover that our upset is our cross to bear.  We can learn alot from the discomfort of being cross.

When you consider what a real cross looks like, you can see what I mean.  Two pieces of board nailed together, the four ends going in four different directions, just like our thoughts.  One board symbolizes our negativity, one symbolizes our positive impulses. Where the boards intersect is a place of no extreems and no judgements: our center 

There's a center in every situation. It is where commonality and balance live. It remains the center, no matter how far our angry thoughts diverge from that still sure point. You're made up of your pluses and minuses, and the intersection of the two is the truth of you.  You can always find your way back to YOU, no matter how cross you are.

Breaking up is hard to do.

“He gave me a bowl and I saw,

The Soul has this shape.

Shams and actual sunlight help me now,

Being in the middle

of being partly myself

And partly outside.”--Rumi

When you begin to change, it often starts with a crack in the facade of your old self.  Part of you is letting something useless go so the new, more authentic you can shine through. 

Change can feel frightening and painful. “Who am I if I am not the self I thought I was?”  You are an ever evolving, always changing being.  That is the main truth.   

Resisting change is more painful than changing can ever be.  When you accept that change is inevitable then you can flow with life.  As Leonard Cohn says

“Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. “ 

When you’re changing, breaking the old patterns and habits and even cracking up around the life's difficult challenges, there is a radiance about you that shines through.   Not only are you polishing, refreshing and renewing your relationship with what is,  you are discovering a more authentic, present, and resilient  you.   What could be more beautiful.

More About Freedom

 "It is important to remember that it is tiring, and trying, being free: and in times of exhaustion affection for freedom has always waned, whatever lip-service might be paid to it.

"The conclusion I draw from the history of slavery is that freedom is not just a matter of rights, to be enshrined in law.  The right to express yourself still leaves you with the need to decide what to say, to find someone to listen, and to make your words sound beautiful; these are skills which need to be acquired.  All that the law says to you is that you can play your guitar, if you can get hold of one.  So declarations of human rights provide only a few of the ingredients out of which freedom is made."

--from An intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin 

Deerly Beloved

There's a deer that's decided she lives in our neighborhood.  She eats the roses, pulls up new plantings, and terrifies the dog.  Not even people scare her away.  She's so certain of her place that she seems indignant when a neighbor, waving a beach towel, finally freaks her out.  She reacts by leaping over a few fences.  She'll go to another yard for now, but she'll be back. This is her place, and she has comfortably set down roots here.

Our yards are merely rooms in her house.  She'll stay as long as the food is good and the atmosphere mellow.  She has no mortgage, she doesn't own a thing, the rent she pays is sassy deer attitude and her grocery bills are non-existent. .  She has nothing except her "deer-ness" to give, yet my world is a better place because of her entertaining self.  She's a feast for the eyes, a T.V. show for the dog, a gardening challenge, and an exciting and surprising call-of-the-wild addition to an otherwise ordinary urban day.  Up close, deer are really big!  It's like having a small horse back there.  It's exciting.

May we all take so little and add so much to the world.

  

Embrace Your Inner Lemon (part 2)

Lemon tree, very pretty 

And the lemon flower is sweet,

But the fruit of the poor lemon,

Is impossible to eat. 

from "Lemon Tree" by Peter, Paul and Mary 

So goes the song, but I disagree.   

Want a great summer drink? Lots of lemons, sugar and water gives you lemonade.  Blend the fruit with some sugar, eggs and custard and put it in a crust and you’ve got a fabulous pie.  Blend some lemon juice with a bit of flour, powdered sugar, and a few other things and you have a delicious lemon bar.  And notice this about these recipes: They all have sugar in common.  Just add a bit of sugar to the poor little lemon and it becomes a treat.

Let’s extend the metaphor we discussed in “Embrace Your Inner Lemon (part 1)”: let’s say that the lemon is your worst fault, and sugar is love.  Corny? Yeah, I know, but think about it:  You start adding love to your, or anyone else's, faults and you’ve got understanding, empathy, compassion, and peace of mind.   

Nothing could be sweeter than that.