It's 2014. 2014. We're nearly as close to 1980 as we are to 2050. Just let that sink in for a bit.
While our inevitable spiral towards the great mystery that is the future continues, I'd be amiss not to at least least a few words on the year that was. It's always hard looking back on a year and judging it either wholly good or bad. Each year seems to flash by in but a second, and yet when you examine it in its entirety, you see that there actually was a lot crammed in there! So while there may be great sadness, there will undoubtedly be great joy as well. And even if it were all terrible from January to December, as you know from my previous posts, hardship is what builds you as a person, and it is in those hard years that you truly live.
Last year I feel I did not truly live. There were moments of wonder and new beginnings, but for much of the year I felt dormant. Not happily content, but just… as if I was barely existing. Drifting from one experience to another, with hardly a notable moment between.
This year, that is changing. I didn't even wait for New Years and its cliche resolutions; I started at the end of December. Focus. Motivation. Happiness. I know it sounds like a tired routine from a freshly-brainwashed optimist, but I've already felt a change. I was lying in bed one night and I saw it all roll out before me. My life. Before me as I stared up into the dark ceiling. Each day ticking away. Tick. Tick. Tick. Every second closer to my death. You can't change it. As they say, death and taxes. In that very moment I was scared. Like I was on this terrifying rollercoaster (I love rollercoasters, but the very thought of this one was spine-chilling), that I could neither stop nor avoid. Every moment in my life whizzing by as I sat on the seat, screaming until the bitter end. I was not afraid because of death, but because of how I was merely a passenger in my own life. Watching it tick tick tick away as if it were on a petrol metre just beside me. Each day sitting around doing nothing, another tick of the pump emptying into oblivion.
Scary. It's hard, but I'm changing this. Breaking habits and stopping the negative thoughts that come with living in such a dormant state is certainly hard, but I'm doing it. I don't want to look up and see I've reached the end of the roller coaster, and feel that sadness I know will come if I look back and see I've never really taken part in life.
The Winner's Bible. I've been reading this book, and I'll tell you what, it's one of the most intense and amazing books out there to help you out if you're feeling anything like I am. I'm about a third through, and already I'm waking up feeling more and more focused. If 2013 was the year of absence, then I know 2014 will surely be the beginning of the lifetime of experience and happiness I know I'll find.
So what of 2013? Highlights would definitely have to include my trip to Singapore. Sports victories. Dates (those which didn't work, and those that… did). Getting on TV. Making new friends, even if it meant saying goodbye to many who I realized weren't. Kittens and all their trials and joys. Probably just as many that I've forgotten as well.
Well, here's to a great 2014. May it forever be the year I re-began my life. I hope it brings as much joy to you as it already has to me. There's something about a New Year that says you can do anything, be anything and no matter what happened last year, there is always a new day...
Showing posts with label Contentment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contentment. Show all posts
Friday, 3 January 2014
Sunday, 26 August 2012
Misery Loves Misery
Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap. High school and everything. Just skip it.
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is?
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? Those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that...
The above quote is from the movie 'Little Miss Sunshine'. If anyone has watched the film, and you really should, you'll probably remember Steve Carrell imparting this wisdom to his nephew. Despite being entirely funny, it is also very true, and probably one of my favourite movie quotes of all time.
The topic is contentment. Happiness in your current state of being. I read the word and imagine someone sitting in a warm, comfy armchair with a blanket, some snacks, watching tv or reading a newspaper. Maybe there's a cat purring away on their lap. It's all very nice. Pleasant. You're happy and don't really care what happens outside or if this moment ever ends.
It is also completely useless.
Contentment is the opposite of living. If you are content, you are more or less metaphorically dead. My philosophy has, and always will be, that experience is life. When you are content, you are experiencing nothing new. You are living in a stale, albeit comfortable, state where there is nothing left to strive for. So by that rationale, pain and suffering is life, as those are the only real times you experience anything meaningful at all. The times you are happy, content, comfortable, you are not learning anything. It's the years of hardship and pain that define us. What do winning sports teams learn? And what about a team that has lost? At the top, the only ways are stagnation or decline and the old saying, learn from your mistakes rings ever true.
People frustrate the heck out of me when they do not want to venture out of their comfort zone. They never want to feel discomfort. They're so zealous to actively avoid displeasure and pain that it rules their entire life. And when suffering comes, and it does, it hits them hard and they scarcely cope. But they learn. What were they learning by avoiding risk and by avoiding pain? They learnt only how to avoid living.
It may sound a bit like I'm stuck in Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' novel, but I really do believe everything I've written above is true. I don't live for status or fame or wealth. I live for experience, because that is my version of success. The days I'm most miserable are the days where I do nothing. I don't experience anything. The days where I'm at home, stagnating; content and comfortable, but completely miserable at the fact. And from the misery, I learn. Mostly not to sit around being miserable haha...
So every day I strive to add a new experience to my life. At the end, I want to be able to look back with many stories to tell and say "I have no regrets". I may have experienced a lot of suffering, and I really have already in my short life, but to tell the truth, I kinda enjoy the pain. I look back on tough times in my life and think "I made it! I'm here!" There will undoubtedly be times I enjoy an experience, and other times I do not enjoy an experience, but the key thing is to accept every experience, appreciate what it can teach you and don't see failure, discomfort and pain as a bad thing, but as a chance to learn and live. Through being unhappy it comes around and in turn, makes me happy.
This feeds pretty well into a mind-blowing radio show I listened to late one night a few months ago. I kidnapped my family's head-set radio and flicked through the channels. I came to one, the last FM frequency, the local suburb's station, probably with an audience you could count on a single hand. And yet it was one of the most profound shows I've ever listened to, on Buddhism and suffering. If I look through the notes I took down, I'll find the name of the speaker and give it to you sometime.
The speaker talked a lot about suffering and pain. The true way to life is to take the 'middle path', experiencing the high and lows of the life around you. The joy and the suffering. The monks he talked of saw these experiences as positive experiences and that this middle path is the road to liberation. Buddha says himself, "Life is dukkha". No, it's not slang, it means suffering. Life is suffering. For Buddhists, the view of suffering is so vastly different from the association we make with the term in Western culture: unpleasantness, to be avoided, bad. But whether we notice it or not, from the moment we are born, to the moment we die, we are suffering. There is no avoiding it. Whether you learn from it is another thing entirely.
Although it's always nice to be comfortable and content, I think I'd much rather prefer to suffer and be happy in that suffering for the rest of my days. Always happy, but never content. I don't want to know that day I stand there thinking I've got nothing more to achieve, nothing more to learn, nothing more to gain and experience. The day we stop striving, suffering and seeking new experience is the day we are dead.
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is?
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? Those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that...
The above quote is from the movie 'Little Miss Sunshine'. If anyone has watched the film, and you really should, you'll probably remember Steve Carrell imparting this wisdom to his nephew. Despite being entirely funny, it is also very true, and probably one of my favourite movie quotes of all time.
The topic is contentment. Happiness in your current state of being. I read the word and imagine someone sitting in a warm, comfy armchair with a blanket, some snacks, watching tv or reading a newspaper. Maybe there's a cat purring away on their lap. It's all very nice. Pleasant. You're happy and don't really care what happens outside or if this moment ever ends.
It is also completely useless.
Contentment is the opposite of living. If you are content, you are more or less metaphorically dead. My philosophy has, and always will be, that experience is life. When you are content, you are experiencing nothing new. You are living in a stale, albeit comfortable, state where there is nothing left to strive for. So by that rationale, pain and suffering is life, as those are the only real times you experience anything meaningful at all. The times you are happy, content, comfortable, you are not learning anything. It's the years of hardship and pain that define us. What do winning sports teams learn? And what about a team that has lost? At the top, the only ways are stagnation or decline and the old saying, learn from your mistakes rings ever true.
People frustrate the heck out of me when they do not want to venture out of their comfort zone. They never want to feel discomfort. They're so zealous to actively avoid displeasure and pain that it rules their entire life. And when suffering comes, and it does, it hits them hard and they scarcely cope. But they learn. What were they learning by avoiding risk and by avoiding pain? They learnt only how to avoid living.
It may sound a bit like I'm stuck in Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' novel, but I really do believe everything I've written above is true. I don't live for status or fame or wealth. I live for experience, because that is my version of success. The days I'm most miserable are the days where I do nothing. I don't experience anything. The days where I'm at home, stagnating; content and comfortable, but completely miserable at the fact. And from the misery, I learn. Mostly not to sit around being miserable haha...
So every day I strive to add a new experience to my life. At the end, I want to be able to look back with many stories to tell and say "I have no regrets". I may have experienced a lot of suffering, and I really have already in my short life, but to tell the truth, I kinda enjoy the pain. I look back on tough times in my life and think "I made it! I'm here!" There will undoubtedly be times I enjoy an experience, and other times I do not enjoy an experience, but the key thing is to accept every experience, appreciate what it can teach you and don't see failure, discomfort and pain as a bad thing, but as a chance to learn and live. Through being unhappy it comes around and in turn, makes me happy.
This feeds pretty well into a mind-blowing radio show I listened to late one night a few months ago. I kidnapped my family's head-set radio and flicked through the channels. I came to one, the last FM frequency, the local suburb's station, probably with an audience you could count on a single hand. And yet it was one of the most profound shows I've ever listened to, on Buddhism and suffering. If I look through the notes I took down, I'll find the name of the speaker and give it to you sometime.
The speaker talked a lot about suffering and pain. The true way to life is to take the 'middle path', experiencing the high and lows of the life around you. The joy and the suffering. The monks he talked of saw these experiences as positive experiences and that this middle path is the road to liberation. Buddha says himself, "Life is dukkha". No, it's not slang, it means suffering. Life is suffering. For Buddhists, the view of suffering is so vastly different from the association we make with the term in Western culture: unpleasantness, to be avoided, bad. But whether we notice it or not, from the moment we are born, to the moment we die, we are suffering. There is no avoiding it. Whether you learn from it is another thing entirely.
Although it's always nice to be comfortable and content, I think I'd much rather prefer to suffer and be happy in that suffering for the rest of my days. Always happy, but never content. I don't want to know that day I stand there thinking I've got nothing more to achieve, nothing more to learn, nothing more to gain and experience. The day we stop striving, suffering and seeking new experience is the day we are dead.
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