Don't Know What to Wear? Put on a Smile
I got up every morning hoping that something would fall from the sky. A smile, eternal love, spectacular trips, fulfilled dreams, personal satisfaction, etc. But day after day, with nothing changing, my desperation grew.
Then I realized that I was messing up every opportunity, tarnishing them with hope and forgetting to act without realizing what I was doing.
So one day, I decided to start accepting my emotions and my hopes. No pain, no confrontations, no emotional prisons. I simply started to cultivate my patience and ability to reflect.
I woke up one day and, not knowing what to wear, decided to wear a smile . It is my lucky dress, my evening dress.
You can’t squeeze water from a turnip
Any day is a good day to do it. But, it is true that everything has its moment in life. You can’t squeeze water from a turnip, so you have to be prepared.
When you have suffered too much you start to wonder what you are doing wrong. Then you realize that the problem is quite simple: You cannot be happy if you are constantly fighting with yourself. It is precisely this inner battle that will destroy you.
I got tired of hearing, “this is nonsense,” “it’s not worth it,” “come on, stop crying,” “it’s time you learned that life is hard,” “you have no reason to be like this” …
But… what is happening? Do people really not know that it is completely normal to be sad when things are not going well? Do you always have to walk around with a smile on your face even when you are destroyed inside?
Well, sorry, but not everything in life is black or white. I acknowledge the greys, the pinks, the yellows and whatever other color.
It is time to understand that every emotion has a purpose in our lives. And that the purpose is not to tarnish our perception and make it impossible for us to see the way the sun rises. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Its purpose is to help us grow and comprehend this place we call the world.
It has become an obligation to feel good. A sad and exhausting obligation. Because, if we are feeling down and we feel the pressure of being forced to feel better and we just can’t manage it, we end up feeling even worse.
It is a vicious cycle that makes us feel awkward, guilty, and miserable. It plunges us into a pit of even greater negativity for not knowing how to get out of it in the first place. Besides that, problems become even bigger in our minds when we reinforce the obligation to feel better and “stop worrying so much.” It is a spiral of guilt.
It is sheer madness to impose feelings or emotions on ourselves. They are there for a reason, take it or leave it. If we choose the option of taking them into account, we will learn wonderful things that help us to be happy in our day-to-day living.
“Wisdom is the art of accepting that which cannot be changed, of changing what can be changed and, above all, of knowing the difference.”
Being happy does not mean being happy all day
Obviously, joy is a basic ingredient of happiness, but it is neither the only nor the indispensable. I could tell you thousands upon thousands of theories and experiences that talk about happiness. But we would still not know how that blend of ingredients would taste like to us.
What is it? A goal? A path? A measure of wisdom? Peace? In reality no one knows what it is, but those who are really happy talk about acceptance and going with the flow . It is these concepts that bring us to realize that we are on the wrong path.
We look for happiness to fall from the sky while we fight with our reality. Things actually go a lot better when we just let them happen. So, maybe, what we really need to do is abandon the fight that is destroying us, accept pain as an inevitable part of life, and understand that peace will only come when we find peace with ourselves.
Feature image from DeepGreen
