Have you noticed at the moment that we’re absolutely inundated with the desire to be happy? It’s promoted beyond imagination. Be happy. Why aren’t you happy? What’s wrong with you?
Happiness. Happiness. Happiness. Happiness. Ad nauseam.
The trouble is most of us are not happy and we’re not going to be happy without some radical change in the way we see the world, lifestyle, things along this nature. So I have a thought. Like with any form of exercise, you have to start at the beginning, don’t you? Initially, your muscles really aren’t trained that well, but over time, you gain some experience and you get better and better and finally, you’re at a point that you have a level of expertise in a sense. You become that excellent baseball player, football player.
And, of course, there is some natural tendencies in people as well, of course. But the average person can still develop their muscles to a certain point. So here is my suggestion. I think every now and then, we need a day not of happiness. We need a day of gloom, of great sadness.
We need to feel terrible in the pit of our stomach. You know that feeling, you awake in the morning and perhaps it’s a little bit late and it’s cold and wet outside and, gosh, you forgot to do your homework and you have some memories from some event in the recent past that ended up to be quite awful, and you just feel terrible. Just terrible. Now, many modern theories tell us, oh, you better get happy. You better make your day positive.
I disagree. I think you should wallow in that day of gloom and probe every aspect of that tragic feeling. Where does it come from? Oh, the things I forgot in my life. Oh, the lessons I should’ve learned and on and on and on.
Since the moment, that horrible, horrible moment. Now, why do I say this? Well, because when you’ve really gone to the bottom of despair, like the stoics tell us perhaps, when you’ve anticipated the absolute worst in any situation, then you can go forward and you can bask in the success of that beautiful moment. The moment that you feel like a magnificent human being. You can’t believe life is so wonderful.
Perhaps you’re in love, Perhaps you’ve just gotten a promotion. You’ve won the lottery. Whatever it is. So you have the exact opposite to gloom. You have joy even though it’s fleeting.
But now you can understand what joy is. What joy is. It’s not this nonsensical diatribe that we hear on the Internet every single day. We watch on television. People are always so successful, always so good looking, always so charming and we know it’s a lie because 99% of human beings aren’t like that.
All you have to do is walk on the street and look at the eyes of people and you know that most people are miserable. Why? Obviously, they’ve never experienced gloom Because when you experience gloom, when you’ve had your day of gloom, you can feel that day of joy, of beauty. So when you wake up in the morning and everyone says you should feel grateful, you understand what this really means, what this truly means. I am so thankful to be me, not the individual that’s existing in a perpetual state of gloom.
I’m happy. And then each task that you do, you’re then able to contrast that. This task could be a joy filled task or it could be a horrible pain filled moment. Then I can choose because I know the sensation of both. And then I think, slowly but surely, we begin to realize that joy is a journey.
Happiness is an adventure that I must attempt to experience on an ongoing basis, and I will have my days of great failure, great suffering, great pain. But I know what it’s like to experience joy and a state of gladness. The comparative life, I think it is really truly necessary. So then when I see these ridiculous statements, be happy, be this, be that, I know that it’s really a choice. My life becomes a choice.
I can’t decide truly whether it’s going to be a good day or a bad day. And every now and then, I will experience a day of gloom so I can refresh my memory about how horrible things can actually be. They can be grim, really grim. But then, I can also refresh my memory with joy, with happiness. One of the great things about being old, I feel, is that you can actually have both those experience in your memory set from your lifetime and you can remember those moments not with regret at all.
Anybody who experiences regret is foolish. Foolish. Because regret means something that has occurred and I bring it forward to the present. But I can’t change it. It happened.
So every moment of your life, I feel, must be a sense of lesson. I’ve been given a lesson from that memory, whatever it is. And I’m not going to do it again or at least I’m not going to do it 3 times because many times we do something foolish a second time, be it may a relationship with a similar human being or perhaps a similar business or perhaps we undertake some type of study that we failed at, but we didn’t really. We could do it again, but it wasn’t for us ultimately. And we then decided to change.
You know, I have a friend who’s now passed away. I loved him deeply deeply, but he went to medical school. Why did he go to medical school? Well, he went to medical school because his father wanted him to be a doctor. I mean, it was a sign of, you know, of course, social status.
You’re gonna advance socially, etcetera, etcetera. So good student, the 1st year, excellent studies. Everyone congratulates him. You’re gonna be a great doctor. The next year, they had to deal with the cadavers, the bodies.
They had to cut and experiment on the bodies. And my friend got sick at the sight of a body. He just couldn’t deal with it and the cutting and the the smell of formaldehyde, whatever it was. And he tried and tried and tried again, but no way. He couldn’t do it, so he quit.
And his father was enraged. They never really had a relationship again. But then my friend went back to school. His first love, music. Got a PhD in music and he excelled at it, truly excelled at it.
And so I think to myself, wow, isn’t there a lesson in all of this? No regrets, only lessons. So every now and then, when you’re feeling down, stay there. Stay in that morose and awful situation for a little while and really experience, really flesh out your horrible day of gloom. And then when you bask in the sunshine of a beautiful day, you’ll know what it truly means.
And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is necessary for us to truly understand what the life experience is, and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.