Everything is personal?
There are no universal right answers, we are all unique individuals that have our own needs and wants, and that means our answers are just as complex, there are not simple mantras that change everything, no short cuts to paradise, to reach the best version of ourselves, there is just work and practise. There are definitely bad answers, ones that drive you down dangerous dead ends, it is never a good idea to join a suicide cult, you will be dramatically cutting down on your life chances and they are a little boring, no matter how much dressing up they might do. We have to find the answers that work for us and then apply them in a regular and consistent fashion, which means having to run many experiments to discover what the possible solutions might be to our personal set of problems and see which align with our reality and the cards that have been dealt to us.
The reason we lack universal and obvious correct decisions to almost anything is that we are not identical beings, even at the level of our base biology reality, there can be surprisingly differences, what can be toxic for most people can be life enhancing for some people, sugar can be slowly lethal for most people and yet other can tolerate large doses and be perfectly fine. Food might come in three basic forms, carbohydrate, protein and fat, but what ratio, type and even timing of our meals can change your outcomes and life. There is not a copy and paste solution to anything, there are certainly things that work for a large number of people, but the issue with any scientific study on health, is that just because something is ninety percent effective, that means it does not work for ten percent of people and can even be actively bad for them, and there is only one way to find out if it works for you. Which is to try it and find out what happens by observing the effect it has on the whole of you, you have to take notice not just of the thing that you are trying to change but the whole of your body and experience, there is no point in a weight loss plan that depresses you to the point of self-harm.
It is the act of self-observation that is so important, it is not an easy fix, it takes effort, you have to not just obverse yourself after the action but you need to observe yourself before so that you have a baseline to compare it to, however we are never really at a baseline, you can continuously changing, not just with time but with the normal course of our habitual behaviour. There are obvious weekly variance, your Friday night habits looks a lot different to your Monday morning routine, this in itself might give you some good data to work with for positive change in your life, it is quite difficult to ignore a regular hangover once you are really taking notice of how bad you are feeling. You might not be able to avoid the question of how you would prefer to spend your Sundays, no judgement, it is just a question of priorities and what works for you, if you are twenty it might be the best use of your time, forty with kids maybe not. This process is just about information, and a useful question is whether this activity is making me happy and healthy, and it deliberately has two parts, happy and healthy is often the same thing but not always, and being clear on the difference and which is more important in your current moment can make a dramatic change in your outlook.
There is no point in wearing an uncomfortable vest of virtue, there is no big payoff for always doing the “right thing” especially if it is making you unhappy in the process, it is fine to have great ambition and high ideals, to care about the world is a good thing. That does not mean you have to sacrifice everything you have for the cause, whichever one it might be this week and there is always another one coming along, and they will look down on you from their moral high mountain especially if you enjoyed looking down on others. Once you get into the morally superior game, there is always going to be someone to one up you, there are certain karmic forces in the world and they have a nasty sense of humour, and if you get in the habit of judging other people that judgement is going to be reflected back on you eventually, because we just are not that good, on the positive side we are not that bad either.
However once you stop judging other people, you get to stop judging yourself, having judgement on your actions is positive but judging the person underneath it is physiological self-harm, there is bad action, not bad people, we are just imperfect growing being of consciousness trying to learn to do better, do you think a five year old is ever a bad actor, or just someone learning to do better, it is better to treat ourselves with the same kindness that we would give to an infant or best friend. After all, we are just trying to do our best in a world of incomplete information and it does not seem to have been constructed by someone who really cared about your personal happiness, it seems like they are after bigger fish, whatever that might be.
We do not get the luxury of playing a bigger game, everything is personal to us and there is not a fairy godmother coming to rescue us, you have already been given everything you need, the rest is up to you, you have been given the opportunity of control and responsibility (they come together as a package deal) to make your own happiness and joy, you have to go out and find it for yourself, it needs to be crafted and discovered, you need to try as many things as you reasonably can, just to check if it makes you happy in some way that you can not even guess at why it should be the case. No one wakes up one day and thinks that if I want to be happy, I should dress up like a hobbit and go to a place where other people are dressed like hobbits and maybe even a shield maiden if you are lucky, that it is something that will make me happy, and yet that happens every year, and each of them got there by a series of small steps and experiments. They have started with reading the hobbit, which lead them into the lord of the rings, then they might have tried and role playing game, which one in turn made them happy and then they were open enough to try the next thing, that is a miracle and wonderful, that there is a road to happiness that makes people so happy and yet engaged in such an odd hobby, those are people prepared to be open to new experiences that are not cool, just joyful.
That is why when you are open you have to be prepared to just try things, even if you think that it might be rubbish or boring, and not just turn up but enter into the activities with a fully open heart and determination to be present with what you are doing. Life can just be endured, you can get through the day, wish your life away or you can choose to be fully present, to see exactly how it makes you feel with open unjudging observation, and it is a skill in itself that maximises your health and happiness if you are open to it. You have to be prepared to be complete wrong, to re-examine your assumptions, to check what you thought was right is actually true, to engage in conversation with the intention to find the common ground between you and whether they have ideas that could change your life. Just doing the same thing repeatedly gets you the same results, it will confirm what you already know, get you to the same place, when really you are searching for the good place.
The good place that finally feels like home, where you are comfortable with your environment, friends, family, purpose, the everyday pleasures and work of each day, there is joy everywhere when we start to pursue it. The greatest lie is the one you tell yourself, that you have to wait for happiness, you have to earn it, and it is just not true, the choice to be happy is always in this moment, waiting for you to pay attention to it in your heart, you have everything you need, you have the responsibility and that earns you the control over your own health and happiness. We are always present with joy, it is always there, right now, just choose to be happy, not a grand I changed the world kind of happiness, just a personal, everyday sort of happiness, the kind that everyone gets a chance at, nothing special, just a simple, joy at the moment you are in, the sort of happiness that is only personal, after all is not everything personal, even joy.
