degero miro claro

“I’m leaving here anyway, so it’s okay.”

I can apply this in almost any way and it should make me feel better.

Does something matter or not? It depends on how you feel about it (btw, I think “It depends,” is the most universally true answer to a vast amount of questions and then you should go from there). A lot of people talk about how happiness comes from within. I think this is basically true in the sense that no outside force is going to be responsible for making you happy, or creating happy feelings in you. You are who you are and you feel how you feel about the world around you and that is the cause of your happiness. But this is where my understanding of it ends.

I always get hung up between the ideas of reaction and creating/deciding your feelings on things. I personally feel almost completely incapable of “deciding” what my outlook or reaction will be to something that happens or that I am exposed to. Things are so, and I feel a certain way when they are present in my consciousness. I’m disappointed about something, or looking forward to something, or it’s cold outside or too hot, or I don’t like the way a food tastes, or I hear a song that makes me feel excited.

When it comes to my emotional response to things, I feel like I could think about it and get used to the idea of feeling better about something that makes me unhappy, but that doesn’t change my true feeling. To me that feels like saying, “Well yes, I know that I have no desire to go the laundromat, and it will make me tired and take up a chunk of my free time with a less preferable experience, but I am going to not feel negatively about it.” The good thing is if you try to be more acquiescent to everyday stuff like this, you can suffer less, but still, you don’t want to be at the laundromat any more than you ever did. Or at least that’s my experience.

Part of the reason I have trouble with my reactions is that I am a ridiculous idealist, I am as picky as the day is long, and I do not like lying to myself and try to never do it. Trying to change your outlook is not really lying to yourself, but to me one of the first steps of changing your outlook is saying, “I do feel this way, but I’m some how going to say I don’t feel that way anymore, I now feel a new way about it.” I don’t really understand this because to me that is just saying that you feel differently, where if you really acknowledge how you actually feel, at least for me, my original emotional response are my true feelings.

You definitely have to take into account what it is your being unhappy with. Is it something more trivial or transient, and if you just thought about for a minute you really could arrive at a new revelation about how you feel? Sometimes that happens for me, and it is good, I feel like I change my mind, or really more like I “get over it”. But that’s the thing that drives me crazy. I guess I ultimately think that any changing of our minds we do, or any change of response to a certain thing or happening, involves GETTING OVER, or BEING PAST something, letting go of it. Letting go of an idea, or hope, or material thing that you are attached to. Ie: I am going to accept that I need to go to the laundromat for the next 2 hours. It just has to happen, so let go of those two hours, and you don’t ever need to be stressed out about it again. I still don’t want to be at the laundromat, but now I am not desiring to not be there, so my discomfort lessens.

To me, letting go is not the same thing as changing your response from unhappy to happy. It is more like changing from resistant to accepting, which will help you suffer less; and I guess this is what people mean when they talk about deciding to change their reaction in order to be happier. But being less resistant is not something that will directly create more happy reactions, it will just lessen the unhappy ones. I feel like our happiness and desire reactions are sort of already built into us, and that we may not be able to create them.

So I guess my point this evening is ultimately that I feel like I cannot make myself feel happy about anything I don’t naturally feel happy about. I can learn to let go of things that make me feel unhappy, and at that point the issue is kind of irrelevant since I have deemed the thing to which I’m reacting to be  something that doesn’t need to be different in order for me to be happy. I will surely be able to suffer less and therefore have a better, more calm, experience of life.

But what about feeling HAPPY!!? I want to be moved to live! What about the euphoria, and the ecstasy, and warm contentment, and all of that?

goodnight neverland!