Happiness, Love, & Contentment
… three beautiful words which invoke three beautiful ideas; these three things are what I believe most humans strive for in their daily life- I know they’re the three things I want most out of life. To be happy is to be content with your life and when you’re content with your life you’re free to put love into all that you do. It’s a simple recipe for a wonderful life- yet becoming content with life can be a seemingly endless challenge.
Being content with yourself is a struggle because we always want the best for ourselves and tend to be our worst critic. Being kind with yourself is often that first step towards contentment. We all make mistakes- but when you can take that self-defeating chastisement out of the equation, you allow yourself to perceive mistakes as a learning opportunity; you take that pressure off yourself and allow room for growth. Growth is a key for happiness, the more you overcome challenges, the more you learn about yourself- your likes and dislikes; even if you may not know exactly what you want, learning what you can’t stand is a key factor in figuring out what will make you happy. Being content with life also means that you have to find ways of accepting those things which you don’t enjoy, but must do, in this case a change of perception is most often all that is needed; restructuring your thoughts to find that small positive within the negative can dramatically alter your “happiness level” for example: realizing that a long commute is the perfect time to practice meditation and clarity of mind transforms that stop and go traffic into therapy.
Attempting to perceive any situation from multiple points of view not only strengthens your problem solving abilities but also allows for better understanding and compassion. The better you are at perceiving life positively, the more likely it will be to give love and receive love; and isn’t that what life is mostly about? Loving others and loving ourselves is power, it’s power you can choose for yourself, it’s power that can and will change the world. Everyone deserves a world full of love, but we must take the first steps ourselves. This year of service is allowing me to begin the steps towards being content with myself and with life-it’s by no means an easy process and I can quite easily fall into periods where I allow negativity to dominate my thoughts. But when I’m consumed by negativity I do two things: First, I remember that the strongest are not always those who continuously succeed, but are the ones who always get back up when they get knocked down, and second, I listen to the Arthur theme song:
Everyday when you’re walking down the street, everybody that you meet
Has an original point of view
And I say HEY! what a wonderful kind of day.
Where you can learn to work and play
And get along with each other
You got to listen to your heart
Listen to the beat
Listen to the rhythm, the rhythm of the street
Open up your eyes, open up your ears
Get together and make things better by working together
It’s a simple message and it comes from the heart
Believe in yourself (echo: believe in yourself)
Well that’s the place to start (to start)
And I say HEY! what a wonderful kind of day
Where you learn to work and play
And get along with each other
because sometimes, all we need, is to remember to believe in ourselves and be a little carefree.
Casey Robinson, EUIP Intern 2011-12, working at St. Joseph’s Center in Venice