What's in a Happiness Cocktail?

The journey to ones ‘inner being’ or ‘authentic self’ is a quest I believe most of us are on at some stage, if not all of our lives. This journey is so popular that you can take just about any route you like to get there! In fact, most things we do in this life are in the pursuit of happiness. It’s a big business these days and people go to many different lengths on their journey. Some backpack across the globe, others meditate in ashrams, some devote themselves to missionary work, some join cults, some engage in deep rituals and religious/spiritual work. Others take a less strenuous journey via clothing stores, beauty parlors and cute cocktail bars on a Friday night. Whatever the journey, we all crave the same destination. To find a place within ourselves where we feel still. At peace. Where we know what we want and how to get there and our life just makes sense.

A common Friday night plan with the girls, to find 'inner peace' at the bottom of a bottle of Champers!

I am glad I am not in front of you so you can’t punch me when I shatter your illusion, but it’s not going to happen. Sorry! Not if you’re as pathological as I am! No one I know has found Nirvana! No one I have ever heard of wakes up and faces the day without mini demons in their heads or issues to face. Oprah, for God’s sake, still has her own issues regardless of the fabulousness she has brought into the lives of bazillions of people! Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) will still face her issues and I bet her head is not a bed of bloody roses every day!

That place in us in fleeting. That feeling is fleeting! Because there is always another man, another job and other friend, another option that will throw what we thought we knew into chaos. So I am here to ask you (nicely and without violence) to forget this idea of mental utopia. To thank it for its stay in your mind, kiss it goodbye, and let it go. I have something better for you….I promise! It just asks you to look at things in a new way!

 If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? Alice in Wonderland

Feces is going to happen! It just is. You can’t control it and frankly, life wouldn’t be any fun without it!  It’s what challenges us, helps us grow, helps us mould who we are and who we want to be. It shows us we still have ‘stuff’ to deal with. It gives us opportunity to blossom, as ungraceful, inconvenient and downright nasty it might seem at the time.

If we’re all lucky, we will grow old, but the safest thing you bet on is that feces will happen along the way. People can get fired, have car accidents, go bankrupt, get robbed, get beaten, get raped, get stalked, get a mental illness, lose physical capacity, get cancer, get divorced, lose a child, lose a friend and any number of other things you can possibly think of. These things can happen to you and many have probably already affected you or the people you know!

The irony is, the majority of us walk around with an ‘it won’t happen to me’ attitude. We think this protects us somehow, and yet the opposite is true. An intense gratitude springs forth when we accept that any moment our number could be up. It sounds morbid and that is not my intention. More a recognition that tomorrow might never be, or at least not in the way that today is. In the course of twenty-four hours, anything can happen.

I heard an R&B song once and this line has always stuck with me: you can plan a pretty picnic but you can’t predict the weather. I love it! It reminds me that we can make plans, set goals, be so organized even the most anally retentive among us relax, but the truth is, these are just illusions of control. Yes, they can lessen the possibility that things will go wrong, but random catastrophe can never be mitigated.

In our society, we have been mis-wired to believe that a normal life is one without drama, chaos, sadness. We are taught that feeling pain, in any form, is not normal. This is confirmed throughout popular culture where we are bombarded with product marketing, mainly for painkillers and antidepressants, which promises to ease our pain and return us to a ‘good life’ and get on with things.

Is it time for my medication, or yours?

Expecting that life is supposed to feel good, all of the time, is like saying to the world, “my favourite colours are red and yellow and I demand to only see these colours and no others.” Will it happen? No way! And would we really want it to? If we were to walk in to an art gallery and see plain canvases in just those colours we like, we would find it hard to see the ‘art’ in them.

Not to go all cliché’ on you, but our own life really is a work of art. It is in how we put together the elements that exist in our lives that we are given the opportunity to create something beautiful. However unlike actual art, where artists choose the elements they want to work with, often we just have to go with the flow and create something out of what life throws at us. This is where the heart of the ‘art’ lies.

We do not have to like every colour in life’s rainbow, but they all exist and all show up at different times. It is how we respond to them and use them that matters. This is why we question life and foster new ways of doing things, we are expanding our artist toolkit and learning new techniques to make our life-art more beautiful and satisfying.

A deep sense of peace is only contracted when we accept that our life journey was never meant to be perfect. This peace is not constant (unless you’re a saint), it won’t make us overflow with joy, but it is pervasive. The origin of deep happiness is to accept that we will stuff up, life will not always take us where we want to go and we have to generally accept challenges and hiccups as part and parcel of being alive!

We will do things that make us want to bang our heads and yell, “bugger! Did I really just do that-again?” We will let ourselves down sometimes. We will experience amazing joy sometimes. We will lose things and people and have experiences we wish we didn’t. We will fall in love, get sick, gain weight, get bad haircuts, have fashion faux-pas, fight with people and have bad days or weeks. But it is how we choose to deal with these things and synthesize them into our lives that creates a life worth living- an authentic life! Are we going to go into every negative situation screaming and kicking? Or shall we strap on our sense of humour and a hard hat and hope for the best.

 

The awesome news is that life is cyclical, like the seasons, and the law of nature dictates that nothing stays the same-it’s all part of the journey! So if you’re in a ‘good’ season or a ‘bad’ one, know it won’t stay that way for too long. If people are dropping from your life, let them. It's winter and the dead leaves fall to make room for spring. If new things are blossoming in your life, don't be afraid. Welcome them! The intense time of change will be followed by a settling period. All will be fine. If things are static right now, they won't be for long! Hold on to your hat, change is coming! If things are just dandy at the moment, relish it! This too, will pass!

 

There is an additional secret to happiness that took me 32 years to realise. I want you to think of fostering happiness in your world like mixing a little cocktail… If you mix in what I am about to tell you with a good dash of accepting that life is full of surprises and not all of them are good, you will find yourself smiling most of the time! And here it is: no-one is watching you and there are no mistakes! There are just choices! Some work out-yippee! Others don't- oh well! Living is like driving in a new city without a GPS. We are constantly working from our internal compass and trying new roads. Some lead us to where we want to go and others don't. But in going down the roads that don't give us what we want, we learn what we do want!

 

If you think of it that way, it’s easy to see that there just cannot be mistakes! It’s all just a journey and every single step brings you closer to the life you want even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time. So live loud, live proud and for God’s sake do not apologise or berate yourself for trying a new road, even if it doesn’t take you where you hoped it would! That’s courage, that’s living a rich life and you should be chuffed with your balls to give things a go in the first place!

What results is an authentic life generated from integrity, humility and resilience. Integrity is born from a commitment to synthesize the elements that life gives us the best we way can. Humility is born from knowing that- although there are no mistakes- things will occur in our lives which challenge us and may bring out darker sides of our soul. Resilience is born from the ability to get up, brush ourselves off and get back on the horse. And I don’t know about you, but I would rather spend my life trying to get back on the horse than just lay down under it where I could be trampled to death!

What it boils down to is that the core ingredient of the happiness cocktail is acceptance. If you accept life and know that faeces will just happen sometimes, if you accept yourself and all the stages of growth and change you find yourself in along the way and remember that there are absolutely no mistakes, just avenues you won’t necessarily try again, you have the perfect cocktail to live by. And, if perchance you happen upon somebody who dons the dreaded ‘Cap of Condemnation and Judgment’, you are under no obligation to drink from the cocktail of guilt and shame they may be trying to ram down your throat. Just smile sweetly and say: “what you view as a mistake, I see as the perfect opportunity to learn what I do not want in my world. But I do think it’s just awesome the way you have my life figured out. I wonder if yours needs any attention?” and go about your day.

Until next we speak, butterfly kisses

Wyld.x