You can use whatever theories or concepts or excuses you like but in the end the feelings you experience do not come from external things. You are not some victim of your day. You’re not a victim at all. You can tell yourself you are but what you really are is a participant. And in this game anything can happen, including crappy stuff to you and me.
The problem is that people want to be happy when it’s healthier to be pointed toward happiness. First off, happiness is only a tiny portion of life to focus on so it’s a bit boring; plus it’s difficult to enjoy one’s life based on happiness when all worthwhile successes are necessarily preceded by challenges and the failure naturally associated with learning. Such is the Yin and Yang of life.
If the route to happiness is necessarily through pain and struggle then we’re doomed before we start. But what if we didn’t want to be happy? What if instead we were just oriented toward happiness? Then even when we are at our darkest, happiness is still in view and therefore possible. And moving toward it feels good because we’re continually feeling better than we previously did. After all, good feelings can only exist as a contrast to not-good ones.
Your day does not enter your life like a storm and stay. Days are days. The issue is you start making yourself the star of the day. When the photocopier breaks that’s not a part of all of your co-worker’s days, it’s yet another hassle for you to live through. Our ego puts itself in the middle and then thinks the world was supposed to go the way it thought it would. The unpleasant feelings we get come from comparing what we got to what we wanted.
If you don’t feel good it’s because you are entertaining thoughts that lead you to suffer. Yes there might really be unfortunate things happening but it’s impossible to make those go away by fantasising about other ways things could have been. Once something has passed it cannot be changed and can only be accepted.
What you think of as a bad day is really just a day where you’re placing a particularly negative lens over everything you see. Stop calling that a mood and using it as an excuse to punish others and yourself. Free yourself from that thought prison and understand that you can at any time begin watching the world around you for positive things. The more you do it the better you get at it until you eventually–and often easily–find yourself with a completely different and wonderful life.
Have yourselves a great day.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.
I help people achieve better mental health by teaching them about reality.
