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What are you going to do? Swoop in and take action… make it worse? Are you going to enact another cruelty in the name of justice?
Make sure you go beyond what you feel before you act.
Our natural instinct is to relieve ourselves of pain (negative), but many times in our thrashing for equilibrium we harm others.
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The problem with being self-sufficient is that you teach yourself never to ask for help. Pretty soon, you never ask for anything.
The problem is, how do you teach someone how to love you when you don’t share or even talk?
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I know what works: watch the tutorial first, follow along. And yet, every time I waste half a day thinking I can figure it out alone. This jump-in-first behavior is hubris, but “figuring it out” is also an adventure.
To repeatedly frustrate yourself is puzzling, but the pleasure is in the puzzle: life is in the idiocy of challenge, not dwelling in the known.
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Happiness is not finding something or adding something. If it were, rich people would be happy.
To discover happiness you must clear away the excess. We bury our happiness, suffocating it under our wants and ambitions, our fears and failures.
Once cleared away, we find happiness is not something we seek, but something we have always had.
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You can be fine, even happy, amid anxiety and outrage. These feelings come over us, but we can watch them and not identify with them.
I can’t do it for long, but sometimes when my contentment is attacked, I realize fighting empowers the negativity while simply observing without connecting causes it to dissolve.
More importantly, I can only do this when I know I am scared or threatened.
Then I must ask why I fear: nothing can destroy "me," just my attachment to my illusory social standing.
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Happiness is found when “I” disappear.
The paradox of identity is we identify with something, which often has desires, demands, and behaviors (attachments).
The paradox is to consider who you are making happy by trying to be happy: demanding “I” want to be happy sabotages happiness, while to dissolve the self and its desires you uncover happiness.
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Staying silent and non-reactive will never allow you to shine, challenge yourself, or try something new.
Without risk, you will never be able to feel good or accomplished because not only will no one else know what you’re capable of, but neither will you.
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I am happiest when I cease to identify with myself. When I am actively engaged in a project (or entertainment) and find myself grinning and humming with no thought of "I," it is when I recharge and discover the world as positive.
The paradox is to consider who you are making happy: if the "I" goes missing when you experience joy, what is doing the enjoying? Perhaps the "me" beneath the ego.
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Where your attention goes is your state of being.
Depression, anger, and resentment are good at drawing and maintaining attention, so we identify with that state.
Unfortunately, humans are not very good at predicting what will make us happy (what will draw our attention) long-term: we tend to normalize positivity quickly, crashing back into negative wool-gathering.
For example, a new car or pay raise makes us happy only for a short time, but these are major life-altering positives we predicted would bring us contentment or joy.
To be happy, we must balance pleasure and purpose, but we tend to gravitate towards pleasure without considering extended fulfillment by focusing on our life goals.
– ideas from Paul Dolan
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We seek to receive love. Instead, choose to care deeply and prioritize another: in giving love, you have the love you desire without demanding anything in return.
