JetUNsetter

I often ponder on life and happiness and the meaning of it all and how to become happy. What I should do. Other than writing a blog about it and inviting people to help me make sense of it all, that is.

During this journey, I stumble often on that sad realisation that my main block to happiness is myself. And then I discuss about this with the wise men and women I have the fortune to be in contact with and they tell me I am harsh on myself. I cannot be my enemy. OK, no point in being agressive to oneself and negative self talk has proven to be damaging, fair point. But who is the blocker then to my happiness? Cause, no matter how convenient it may be, it’s not other people. So not us, not them. What is left?

And then I see it. A dark, strong, deep force. A feeling coming from the places in my mind and body I avoid. An experience of myself I hate.

Fear.

But then, fear of what? Fear of unworthiness, of imperfection, of death, a psychologist would say. And then I wonder, is there a common denominator or are these different fears? Is there a single fear the unhappy ones share?

After years of uncontrollable overanalysis and paralysis on this, I fear there is in fact such a common fear. We, the unhappy lot in the world, we are afraid we have become or will become our parents. The unsuccessful, miserable, unhappy people we grew up with. These people, the parents, define us through their mere skill into happiness. It’s not their money or education, not even their love (or absence of it). It’s their ability to be happy themselves that will possibly determine our chance at happiness.

Our parents are the first experience of the world, and the source of skill and knowledge we need to survive. We learn to eat, walk, think, feel by them. Like them.

We then grow and meet other people to only realise that some are happier than these two adults we spend so much time with. But we don’t spend enough time with the happy ones to learn their craft. We just meet them and become aware of our misery and misfortune. We meet them to start to seek an escape and salvation from our oblique fortune. Unfair. At least we could be left alone believing our unhappy normality is the only option rather than knowing there is something better we cannot easily access, right?

The easy recipe to happiness I guess is to be born by those who know how to be happy. Spend every day of our lives with them for years on end as we grow and inevitably we pick the skills ourselves. These are the exact people that thank their mum or their dad or God forbidding the ultra lucky ones who thank both their parents (!) in an Oscar ceremony or at the beginning of a commencement address.

Ok, so how about the rest of us? Bizarrely, the rest of us instead of just mimicking our parents we need to do the exact opposite, right? That is not necessarily a difficult recipe to happiness. Just a negative approach. But here is the secret: we fear of becoming like them. And the more we fear, the more we become. Instead of following the opposite of what they have done, we get confused. That is the blocker. The more we fear of their mistakes, is like focusing on them, by focusing, we learn them too well. We then make them. Fear, makes us mimicking the wrong, makes us forget the recipe was to simply overturn it.

Blessed those with the happy parents. For the rest of us, the recipe is simple as long as we don’t buy that one extra ingredient. Please help me make sense of this one too…