2 posts tagged “sadness”

Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks
naturally upon what he owes to others, rather than on what he ought
to expect from them.
- Elizabeth de Meulan Guizot, French author (1773-1827)

What do I owe to others? What do you owe to others? What do I owe to you?

Should anyone even care?

Yes.

To begin, those who are fully aware of what they should expect from others will always be disappointed. If nine people out of ten they meet do exactly as they expect, these people--the expectors--will remember the tenth. The tenth, the violator of norms the expectors expect of others, will stand out in their memories like the proverbial sore thumb.

That's human nature. The behaviour that violates norms is not just remembered, but is often held up as indicative of the kind of person who does "that kind of thing." We tend to forgive ourselves our misdeeds before we are prepared to forgive others. A generalization, to be sure, but still typical of human nature.

Tell a lie and it may take you decades of truth telling to overcome the memory others have of that lie. Violate the fidelity of marriage and it will result in divorce in most cases. Fail to live up to a promise you made may cost you a friendship, or a customer, or the trust of who knows how many people who learn about it. Yet it's in the nature of humans to tell the occasional lie, in their hormonal and instinctive makeup to seek more than one sexual partner, and it's often nothing more than memory failure or being too busy that causes people to fail to fulfill their promises.

Putting too much emphasis on what we expect of others is fundamentally fraught with failure.

Think now about someone you know who offers a lot of himself or herself to help others. That person is usually (but not universally) loved and respected. There will always be those who resent what such givers accomplish and the respect and accolades they may receive because they are jealous. But jealousy and envy are sicknesses that fortunately live in few people.

Do I owe something to you? Well, you may say, I owe you a good read since you took the time to read this. From my point of view, I spent over five decades of my life actively learning from others, while having little to offer them in return. By writing this article and many others, I share what I have learned as a way of paying forward what others gave to me over so many years.

I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. To a great extent, that happiness is based on what I learned from others. In some cases, what I learned from them was how to cope with misfortune and errors. In others it was how to do things I had never tackled before and to see them through to completion and success. If I share that with you, you have a better chance of achieving what I have, of feeling the way I feel.

I can't make you happy. I can only point you in the right direction. Your motivation must come from within you. If you focus on how others disappoint you, you will often be disappointed, have negative feelings about others and the world in general. If you focus on what you might do to make their lives a little better, you will have successes. Some greater than others, that's true. Some successes you may never learn about because the others involved moved on before changing their lives.

But you will know.

More than gratitude and self satisfaction result from helping others. It takes time and many instances of helping. But something happens within you that changes your life forever. I don't want to be specific about what this mystery is because I don't want you to use it as an incentive to help others. Do that because it's the right thing to do.

Doing that kind of right thing feels good. Try it if you haven't. Do more if you have. If the latter, you will understand the mystery already.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy and well balanced children who will take better care of their world, their families and their lives than their ancestors did.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune.
He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has
deprived misfortune of its power."
- Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher (c. 4 BCE – CE 65)

I'm not certain that happiness consists of enduring the highest and lowest fortune has to offer. Most of us endure such highs and lows (or believe we do) during our lives.

Depriving misfortune of its power by living through the vicissitudes of life can hardly be the road to happiness if all of us that don't die in the process manage to live through them. Enduring them with steadiness of mind may be a sign of emotional flatness, an inability to feel strong emotions, even in times of stress.

Seneca's true meaning may have been lost in translation. I'm going to say he meant that people who can live through the trials of their lives as well as the high points without succumbing to excesses or emotional trauma were well prepared to face them.

Being able to cope with the best of times and the worst of times requires skill and knowledge. The knowledge is pretty simple. To cope with these eventualities, we need to know that they will come, both the good and the bad, and that we will survive them and return to some sort of normal state of life. Bad always passes, for everyone, so long as they live through it. Exceptionally good times don't last forever either.

Just knowing that much makes us prepared to face the ups and downs of life better.

The skill part of being prepared for the inevitable variations of life means having the ability to see past the emotional element to the results or consequences that will follow.

If we are going to a place we haven't been before and we travel for hours without knowing exactly where we are, we might feel that we're lost. Even if we know we are following a route proposed for us, we may feel uncomfortable about the fact that nothing around us is familiar. Yet if we focus on the road as the path to the goal and not as a place of discomfort and unfamiliarity, we can get through the trip knowing that the end we want to reach will arrive, in time. We aren't lost if we know we're on the right path.

Life is the same. If we know that hard times will befall us, we have a plan to get through them and something to fall back on to ease the strain, we can feel confident that we will get through them safely. If we know that good times won't last forever and prepare a plan to account for severe downturns, we can live through them with equanimity as well.

Preparation, having a plan for coping, is the key.

Most people fear bad times but have no plan for coping with them when they arrive. They also don't likely have a plan to get through good times without indulging in excesses ("We've got to have a bigger house and a better car"). When either arrives, they fall apart (in some sense), though in different ways. Look at the statistics of what happens to the lives of lottery winners, even though they may buy tickets for years hoping to win.

We don't have to live our lives as if we are going to die next month or next week. But we should keep in mind that some day the very last day of our life will come. We need to make sure that we have taken into account everything we would like to have accomplished, no matter when that day may arrive. That includes what we might say to or do with our loved ones. That day may come decades from now, or it might come tomorrow.

Worse, for many of us, would be when our spouse dies (or leaves the family home). Though we may be as devoted as possible to our mate, we also need to consider the possibility that a day of being alone may come. If we have a plan for what we would do if that eventuality should arrive, we can put the plan into effect and survive it as safely and with as little self destruction as possible.

Life is not just a matter of living. Living through the vicissitudes of life requires us to have plans we can put into effect when fortune deals us a bad hand or a particularly good one at any unexpected time.

What would you do?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the knowledge and skills they need to live with equanimity through the ups and downs of life, and to teach them before they're needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com