Life (In a Nutshell)

The day we are born we enter a world that tries to capture our attention. We are taught that we are unequal and that competition with each other is necessary to succeed. We become self centered.

We begin to believe that the more we have, the more in important we are from our society’s perspective.

We begin without having many possessions with a sense of inadequacy. We feel unworthy, so we attempt to do as we were taught to feel better about ourselves and we begin chasing our desires in search of happiness.

In doing so we enter a reality of external ever repeating cycles.

We must have a job so we go to school so we can obtain the skills needed for employment.

We believe this job will make us happy, but we find that it is very demanding and only interested in profit margins, not our personal well being. Its purpose is to put us under stress so we are uncertain of our worth, so we work harder (for more profits). The job may even over leverage our skills for its own benefit, and offers no security for long term employment.

The job hasn’t brought us the long term happiness that we hoped it would, but we must endure it day after day after day after day.

We make ourselves part of a cycle that we must work for at least eight hours per day, sleep for eight hours per day, and whatever time is left over we can have a personal life.

So we save money and buy a flashy car, in hopes that this car will show others the worthiness we do not feel within. The car makes us happy only for a very short time so we must find something else to make us happy.

We jump from desire to desire chasing a very fleeting happiness.

We need to feel accepted and loved. So we keep buying things that we hope will impress others.

We find a mate that seems to see the positive qualities within us that we do not see, we may purchase a house to make our mate happy, that in turn will make us happy.

Now that we have a home we must go to the store and fill it with appliances, furniture, wall and table decorations. We are still looking for long term happiness and trying to build a home. All these things require money so we get credit cards and begin to incur debt, and more stress.

We feel that getting married to our mate will make us happy.

It has to, because we constantly see commercials on television that show a man proposing to a woman and giving her an expensive ring. The man (or woman) has a job, a car, and a house and they always live happily ever after.

Because we don’t feel happiness within us, we don’t know how to treat our mate. We don’t understand how to be transparent and communicate properly with our mate as we grow within the relationship. We begin to take our mate for granted, and we grow complacent with our life, and at a point, perhaps many years in the future, the relationship begins to deteriorate and may even come apart.

Now lawyers must get involved (and be paid handsomely) to execute a divorce. This adds more stress.

Up to this point because we were chasing external happiness because of our own feelings of unworthiness, we have:

1. Spent many years being unfulfilled by our job. Benefiting mostly the employer.

2. Spent an exorbitant amount of time and money purchasing a car(s), a house (with furnishings, appliances and decorations) jewelry for us and our spouse, as well as all the other things we purchased while chasing our happiness. Benefiting many external businesses.

3. Incurred a lot of debt by using credit for our house, cars, lawyer etc. Also benefiting external business, banks, and credit agencies.

4. Survived huge amounts of stress, fear, and worry. That benefiting no one.

5. Destroyed a relationship with our spouse because of not understanding or being able to give what was needed for the relationship to strive.

6. We associated our own identity to our job, relationship, and belongings.

Have we found happiness yet after searching for it externally for so many years?

We still feel unworthy and unhappy. We lost most of our identity as we lost our possessions and marriage. We feel lost and without identity.

What did we miss? We did everything right, didn’t we?

What we missed was that if we would have taken the time to understand ourselves within and what really drives us (how and why we think and act as we do), we would have been able to learn how to regulate our emotions. We would understand other people as well.

This would have helped us to not have the need for so many things that external business would have benefited from. We could have purchased a smaller house or rented which may have been less expensive.

Then we could have applied what we learned within to build a solid foundation for ourselves. We could have found balance.

With this balance we would have been more helpful to others and not as self centered as we were.

We would have made more friendships that we benefited, not benefited from. As we helped other people, we would have found contentment and happiness within ourselves, and would have shared this with our partner, being a better balanced spouse, worker, and friend.

We would have had much less stress, fear, worry, and debt because we wouldn’t have needed so many external things or credit.

Perhaps our marriage wouldn’t have failed because we would have understood that happiness comes from giving to others (money, time, energy) rather than taking from them for self benefit.

While we seek outside ourselves we will find ourselves jumping from desire to desire looking for a happiness that can only be found within, or external things that we will invest our identities to which can very quickly be taken away from us.

When we find balance and happiness within, we will not require happiness from anywhere externally, and nothing external to us will have the power to take our happiness away. We will continue smiling as our last possession is taken away from us.

Happiness has always been a choice not an expectation.

The dream is always fleeting. When we look within, we find truth.