Do you find your mood swings between happy
and sad with nothing in between?Do you have to be walking on sunshine to feel you had a good day?
Or did the world fall out from under your feet if it didn’t go so well?
We are currently in a time of ‘urgent
living’. Everyone seems to be in a rush, and everything has to happen today! Now!
This minute!
Within that rush is an expectation, one of seeing
our dreams materialising and all our hard work paying off, or getting what we
believe we want/deserve. But if it doesn’t happen – if that moment doesn’t
bring a rush of joy or success, we fall back in despair, sometimes so deep we
struggle to recover.
We are either really happy or inconsolably
sad. I call this living in extremes.
“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go, and
knowing when to do which of the two.” - Rumi
Some people believe that if they are not
happy all the time there is something wrong with them – or in their
relationship, friendships, job; that if things aren’t working out as they had expected
they are doing something wrong, or failing in some way. They don’t believe it
is okay to have an ‘off’ day and find life a struggle. They have to talk about
being happy ALL the time and only say and do positive things – nothing negative
will be tolerated.
This can lead to feelings of anxiety and deep
sadness – one they daren’t speak about, otherwise it risks falling into a
depressed way of thinking.
It is an ‘all or nothing’ perspective –
‘I’m either happy or I’m sad’.
But the trick to riding the pendulum of
life is not to let it swing too far in either direction. You have to find the
balance.
“Balance is the key to everything. What we do, think,
say, eat, feel, they all require awareness, and through this awareness we can grow.”
– Koi Fresco
You have to accept that some days you might
not wake up feeling full of energy, or looking forward to the day. And during
those times it’s okay to feel sad or overwhelmed and disappointed with life.
The trick is to not hold onto it and believe that it will be like that forever.
I was raised by a mother who wallowed in a
negative mindset. If things didn’t go her way then there was something wrong
and someone to blame. She was never satisfied with what she had in any given
moment. She was always looking for something else, something better, and she
had high expectations.
I unwittingly took on this mindset,
creating drama whenever my life felt dull, usually of a self-destructive,
negative kind: pushing people away, running away, starting over and again and
again, each time believing I would find the happiness I so desperately believed
was out there. It took me a long time to realise that it was only through
stable living and finding a calm within that it would appear – and that it already
resided within me.
“True happiness resides within
you. Happiness is something that you are, and it comes from the way that you
think.” - Wayne Dyer
A friend of mine asked me recently why it
was that everyone around her seemed so happy all the time when she wasn’t. She expressed
how hard it was to keep up the pretence that she was happy too, just to fit in.
But I reminded her that it was an illusion and that it was unlikely they were
happy all the time. It was an assumption she was making that reflected her own
feelings of anxiety about not feeling happy all the time. She believed she
‘should’ be happy all the time, and that there was nothing to complain about, yet
inside she didn’t feel it.
Many of us do this. I have often looked at
others and their lives and felt envy, wondering how they were so content and happy.
Asking myself, how have they achieved that; what am I doing wrong? But in reality I was projecting the thought
that others were happier than me to sustain the cycle of misery and feelings of
failure I was experiencing. When I spoke to those people I found their lives
were not as perfect as I had thought – and some of those people felt the same
way I did.
“Comparison is the thief of Joy.” – Teddy Roosevelt
These feelings can keep us disconnected
from each other, causing us to stand back and keep our distance, even withdraw
from social interaction. But separation causes pain; it is only through
connection we can feel love and a sense of belonging and contentment.
To find balance we need to connect to those
around us, which in turn will enable us to gauge what is real. If we speak our
feelings out loud and be honest about them, and share them, we can stop seeking
unattainable highs through self-imagined ideals of other people’s lives.
By reducing expectations – both from
ourselves as from others – we can start living in the moment, whilst allowing
ourselves the ‘bad days’ and not pushing ourselves to some unrealistic,
insincere emotion.
If we wake up one morning not feeling
either happy or sad, we don’t have to push ourselves to feel any particular
way. We can let the day unfold, accept who we are on that day and in that
moment, without any demands, and be gentle with ourselves if things don’t go
our way.
Once we take the pressure off we allow
ourselves to live more balanced lives, and avoid dwelling in the extremes.
