Choosing Between Joy and Misery
Tonight I was just finishing up some prep work for a client when the terrible news was posted online that a 15 year old Irish girl had been found dead in a deep ravine in the jungle nearby Kuala Lumpur. Nora Quorin went missing 9 days ago from a resort hut which was a part of a trip of a lifetime for she and her parents. Norah was mentally disabled from birth and despite the challenges in her upbringing, she was a treasure to her parents and so the loss they and her family must feel tonight is likely beyond what most could ever comprehend. It is beyond unfair, it is a travesty of life. With each passing minute my mind is acquiring the sadness, the emptiness, the pain and what were smiles and joyous feelings are being displaced by misery. And I think why? Yes the situation is awful and more so the reality for her family. Hearts, thoughts, support, condolences and love, they deserve that and so much more. But what about me and my thoughts and feelings. Is it a sense of empathy or a selfish need to attach and belong in misery. Am I bathing in the hurt and misfortune of others with whom I have no connection other than nationality and the tragedy occurring 70 km away from me. Why am I doing this and what value does this bring to me or to anyone around me or to the world at large?
As shared in the “News” every day, the world surely can be a horrid and hateful and hurtful place and our sense of misery in coping with that could in some ways be justified and yet which of us really wants that for our lives. Do we have a choice between Joy and Misery, particularly when the majority of us are fortunate in the reality of our life circumstance. In the attached link on Youtube from the Indian Mystic and Yogi Sadhguru, he provides some meaningful insight into the choices we can make to be joyous, what it takes and why. The following are some of the insights, but I suggest you watch the video for yourselves.
How it is we can live beyond the entanglement of the misery, sadness and pain of the world in its broadest sense as shared in media and social media and in its narrowest sense in our daily challenges and the misery in our micro world.
Our experience in life is determined by us, not by what is happening around us. The nature of our experience depends on how we are. There is a critical difference between our experience of life and what is life’s situation.
The thoughts and feelings of pain and pleasure, joy and misery, agony and ecstasy comes from within each of us. It is our choice, irrelevant of what is happening in the world around us. And yet it is not quite so simple as it is our ability to see that choice and to rationalise in being able to make that choice! Why not so simple, well that we have been trained through childhood and life experience that we get rewarded for our misery, rewarded in terms of attention, recognition and ultimately we learn to get what we want by defining our status as being miserable in some aspect of our being. We are all expected to engage to misery, its the “right” thing to do. And yet what is the quality of life one can have when you get the attention but are miserable in your being. It is a choice and yet to appreciate that choice requires investment in ourselves and that is not about the physical/virtual things we surround ourselves by but as an investment in our physical, psychological and spiritual well-being. Developing our self awareness and our understanding of choice, so that we can actualise the wonder and joy of us versus bathing in the misery of our situations whether inherent or holistic.
So my challenge to myself and to all is to make great choices in each day, choices for joy and happiness that can spread in the world and to elevate us from the worst our world can offer.
CHOOSE JOY!
