Some say happiness is all in the mind. Some say, you've got to work for it. If they are both true, then happiness has never been understood well. And even so, the mere fact that you are looking for happiness, there is the anti-happiness called sadness.
How can you believe in something and not believe in its opposite? How is there day when there is no night? How is there coldness where there is no heat? You can't attempt to understand one without knowing/acknowledging the other.
Life is a wheel. Life is a box of chocolates. Life is change. Life is everything we understand, and everything we don't.
I can't start to tell of how I saw my life as nothing but goodness in it. Though there were those times that I had underwent pressures, I was able to go through them and hold my head up. But now, the past year and this year of my life is but a very unsteady journey to the unknown. Keeping afloat gets harder everytime.
A friend of mine, not so close one, but nonetheless a good one, lent me a book. Its entitled: "Eat, Pray, and Love". I read the book religiously. Though I'm not much of a fan of love stories, life dramas and stuff, I went through every word of the book to understand it and try to incorporate it. I said to myself, I can now Eat, I do Pray, and who do I Love? For sometime, I told myself I want to love. I want to be happy. Its easy. I know I can do it.
I think a year or so have passed, and here I am still struggling with much of whatever strength I have left within myself. No matter how I try to see my life as something brighter and better, I feel like the wheel turns very fast when I am almost at the top; and then it quickly spins to position me down. At the bottom, yes, that's how I feel.
Everyday, I wake up and pray. I call on to the angels and lend me their strength. And this happens everyday.
But let me share to you a piece of writing from that book. Its helpful, but sometimes, keeping afloat is really a huge effort. This is happiness in the real world:
I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentelessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
- page 345 of Eat, Pray and Love
And one day soon, I want to be able to say to myself, I have sealed a good faith, and will live a happy life. Now this is what I'm telling myself: "I will be happy".