You will not be happy when you lose 10 pounds, or have a different job or a drive better car, when you meet the “right” person, or when “things calm down”. You will not be happy when your biceps or bank account or boobs are bigger, or when your waistline is smaller. You will not be happy if you take medication to grow the hair on your head, or when you wax hair off in other places. You are either happy inside, or you are not happy inside. Nothing outside will fix that for long. You surely can’t buy it.
We have a crazy system set up around us (consumerism and distraction), which simply reflects back the system that exists within us (there’s a void inside I need to fill!). If you don’t wrestle with life’s big questions, and by that I mean, “Is this all there is? What am I doing here? Who am I?”, then those unanswered questions own you, and you’ll have to keep dancing around distracting yourself from the discomfort of not having worked them out for the rest of your life, convinced that happiness lies in external stuff, and wondering why you can’t get there.
Peace comes from understanding and accepting that one day your body will give out and you will exhale for the last time. I hope it’s one day way way off in the future, and that you have the time between then and now to figure out what lights you up from the inside. Because that’s where you find happiness, or inner peace, or the ability to face reality as it is, which is not always as we’d like it to be. It happens inside you as you develop the ability to love yourself, to find your purpose, to uncover your particular gifts and give them away freely, fully, with total abandon. To show yourself some compassion and kindness, to do the work to heal. If you pin your happiness to certain events going or not going the way you’d like, you are nothing more than a victim of circumstance, and there’s just no power in that. We can never control circumstances, we can only work on the way we respond, the amount of power we give to those waves of life that are challenging. We can swim against the current which is exhausting, or we can embrace the zen proverb: Let go or be dragged. Sometimes we just have to realize what we know. Your happiness is good for you, and it’s good for everyone else, too. Sending you so much love, Ally Hamilton