Responsible for Your
Own Happiness
I’m going to
tackle two rather difficult subjects today; doing the first will result in
accomplishing the second.
Last week
while traveling, I met a woman who told me that she felt stuck in a ditch.
Never you mind why a perfect stranger would tell me something so private; I
call it my gift, which can sometimes be seen as a curse.
Anyway, the
woman said that she had been doing the same thing the same way day in and day
out and she didn’t know how to get out of the rut. She said she had tried once
but found herself living the same way with a different set of friends, co-workers
and a new but same kind of spouse.
I closed my
eyes for a second and tried to visualize the ditch she had been stuck in. I
imagined a a large hole in the ground with her at the bottom yelling to me for
help. Without me thinking too hard about it, the image changed and the woman’s ditch became a rut in the sand where she was spinning her wheels.
I opened my
eyes and saw this beautiful lively woman who was animated and energetic and I asked
a simple question. “Could it be that you
are stuck in reverse?” I asked.
Before I
could try to explain the sand dune from my imagination, the woman began to cry.
(This is where the gift begins to feel like a curse.) We were in public and I
knew that she was embarrassed, so I bowed my head and said nothing. Allowing
her to feel whatever she was remembering, I took her hand and held it.
The woman
smiled through her tears and said thank-you. She went on to tell me that she
had tried to remove herself from a painful past but had gotten stuck. She asked me how I knew. I told her that I
knew nothing of her past; that I used the same tools employed by Einstein when
he saw e=mc2 go floating by. Like him, I had I used my imagination.
She went on
to tell me about her life and how she had gotten stuck. Each time she tried to get out of a difficult situation, she had relied
on someone else to rescue her.
This is
where the second lesson comes in; in
order to stop spinning your wheels in the same spot, you must choose to be the
cause of your own happiness.
We tend to
look to someone else to solve our problems. We want to take our burdens to the Lord
and leave them there. (I can hear my religious friends calling me now.)
God, life, Love, the Universe,
whatever you may call it endows us with the gifts to change our own course.
We are connected to one another and
have the energy, power, force, love of our friends and family to help and
guide, but we must choose to live a life that is rich/blessed and fulfilled.
The answers don’t come easy. They
require discipline, learning and relearning, hard work, and yes, belief; but
when you apply the right amount of effort in the right direction, you can spin
your own wheels out of the rut you are in.
Once out, you must throw yourself out of
reverse past neutral and ease your way forward. Once you have the momentum you
need; keep on moving.
The woman
thanked me for enabling her to see her problem more clearly and I thanked her
for the lesson I undoubtedly needed myself.
I told her
that we all need one another to help shine a light on our pathways, but we must
drive our own course.
The band Colpdplay
got it right to a point:
When you try your best but don’t
succeed.
When you get what you want but not
what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t
sleep.
Stuck in reverese.
Lights will guide you home and ignite
your bones
I will try to fix you
Be you, be well, you
fix you
Bertice Berry, PhD.
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