You can spend your life being afraid or you can choose to live in hope - you can choose to put all of your cards on the table and live honestly, passionately and without apology. You can choose to see yourself - truly see the depths of your being - or you can plod along, only skimming the surface of your vast internal world, always too afraid of what you might find were you to plunge deeper, never realizing that there is nothing to be afraid of at all.
Every moment - every breath - is an opportunity for choice: to choose to fully live this one life - the darkness and the light, the happiness and the sorrow... or to not live at all.
I've realized that it's not about being happy. It's not about feeling good. Happiness is always fleeting, and feeling good can be nothing more than an illusion. But the joy of life is always present - and hope is the eternal constant.
I know exactly what I want to manifest for my life in the next year, and yet I'm aware - very aware - that nothing is guaranteed except for this moment. And, at least right now, right now, I'm at peace with that.
Just to throw another thought out there, in response to your comment that "it's not about being happy." The Greek historian Herodotus said "Call no man happy until he is dead," and this may sound a bit grim, but (as I understand it) it reflects a very Greek notion of happiness that's at odds with our usual conception of happiness as, roughly, "feeling good." For them, it meant something like satisfaction with the whole of one's life, or having lived a good life. So in the Greek sense, it IS all about being happy, though not about feeling good: it's about being the people we want to be, living the life we want to live when we're being our own best selves.
ReplyDeleteI'm also reminded of Thoreau's admonition that "Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice." I take that to mean something very close to what you said about every moment being a choice, an opportunity to live fully.
All of which you said very nicely (I just like to elaborate on things).