It Feels Hard Today
When I was young I thought of joy from a scarcity mindset. Perhaps you've experienced this sort of mindset too. In my life it manifested as an Esther who worked really hard to increase productivity and tried to fix everything "wrong" about herself in order to find joy. I would create and implement programs of exercise, diets, or cleanliness in an effort to line up all the dots that would give me joy. And yet, everything I tried only brought me joy for a short time, maybe a day. And then after that day, those productive, peaceful, happy moments would be dampened by stress, sorrow, or illness. In other words, every good day was followed by a series of hard days. Joy was hard work and there never seemed to be as much of it as there was pain or stress.
I started wondering if there was some secret to lasting happiness. In my mind, lasting happiness looked like a life where stress, setbacks, or sadness never sunk deep. When I found the secret to joy I was never going to have another hard day. Because, no matter how hard I worked, or programed, or fixed, there was never as much joy as there was pain. So, I started searching for the secret. The secret that would solve my scarcity of joy.
I didn't find it.
I did discover something else. I've had a lot of good days recently. I'm not exactly sure what brought the good days into existence, I think being able to love myself has a lot to do with it. I also think that finally reaching a healthy balance between work, school, and family has made a difference. Today I'm not so concerned with how I found the good days because I've always been able to create a good day. What I haven't known is how to make the good days last.
In the end, I stopped trying to make good days last, and I stopped trying to avoid hard days. In these past weeks of wonderful, joyful days I discovered that I can do exactly the same thing from day to day. I can begin the day with the same attitude, have the same determined mindset at school, or work at the same amazing job and still not produce the same results each day. Without a doubt one of those days is going to have something hard in it. In less than a month, my car broke down, I didn't get the high score on my physics test that I expected, my broken ankle ached like crazy from excessive walking, I wasn't as efficient at work as I'd like to be, I got sick, and I was unmotivated to do homework. Hard things happen! Hard things happen for no apparent reason! Hard things happen without you doing anything to deserve them! Hard things just happen! But it's your perspective that changes your life.
In the past weeks I've begun to see my life, not as a life filled with pain on a search for fleeting joy, but as a life filled with joy and a few moments of sorrow. I'll be walking down my sidewalk of life in the sunshine and suddenly find myself in a patch of shade. Rather than believing the sunlight is all gone, I keep walking and find myself again in the warm and bright light. On stressful days or in painful moments I tell myself "it feels hard today." But just because it feels hard doesn't mean it's bad. And it doesn't mean the pain will last forever. A hard day doesn't mean I did anything wrong. It means very little about me. Sometimes I think hard moments just flash into our lives like a cloud covering the sun. We didn't walk into them, we didn't cause them, they just came. And they'll leave again when the wind blows.
In the meantime, let's have a joyful time.
I started wondering if there was some secret to lasting happiness. In my mind, lasting happiness looked like a life where stress, setbacks, or sadness never sunk deep. When I found the secret to joy I was never going to have another hard day. Because, no matter how hard I worked, or programed, or fixed, there was never as much joy as there was pain. So, I started searching for the secret. The secret that would solve my scarcity of joy.
I didn't find it.
I did discover something else. I've had a lot of good days recently. I'm not exactly sure what brought the good days into existence, I think being able to love myself has a lot to do with it. I also think that finally reaching a healthy balance between work, school, and family has made a difference. Today I'm not so concerned with how I found the good days because I've always been able to create a good day. What I haven't known is how to make the good days last.
In the end, I stopped trying to make good days last, and I stopped trying to avoid hard days. In these past weeks of wonderful, joyful days I discovered that I can do exactly the same thing from day to day. I can begin the day with the same attitude, have the same determined mindset at school, or work at the same amazing job and still not produce the same results each day. Without a doubt one of those days is going to have something hard in it. In less than a month, my car broke down, I didn't get the high score on my physics test that I expected, my broken ankle ached like crazy from excessive walking, I wasn't as efficient at work as I'd like to be, I got sick, and I was unmotivated to do homework. Hard things happen! Hard things happen for no apparent reason! Hard things happen without you doing anything to deserve them! Hard things just happen! But it's your perspective that changes your life.
In the past weeks I've begun to see my life, not as a life filled with pain on a search for fleeting joy, but as a life filled with joy and a few moments of sorrow. I'll be walking down my sidewalk of life in the sunshine and suddenly find myself in a patch of shade. Rather than believing the sunlight is all gone, I keep walking and find myself again in the warm and bright light. On stressful days or in painful moments I tell myself "it feels hard today." But just because it feels hard doesn't mean it's bad. And it doesn't mean the pain will last forever. A hard day doesn't mean I did anything wrong. It means very little about me. Sometimes I think hard moments just flash into our lives like a cloud covering the sun. We didn't walk into them, we didn't cause them, they just came. And they'll leave again when the wind blows.
In the meantime, let's have a joyful time.
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