On Achieving Peace and Happiness

Piggybacking on the last few ideas in an earlier post, I wanted to share with you how I personally win peace and happiness.

The first thing I have to do is to understand myself. I must clearly know what it is that my heart wants. My heart thinks that it wants attention and praise, but after communing with both my heart and intuition, I've found that all I really want is to make friends, learn, and bask in the glory of being alive. No one wants to die. We just want our challenges and suffering to cease. For good or for worse, this world has no shortage of obstacles and pain. Most of us learn at an early age to pursue pleasurable experiences, and to avoid the situations that cause us pain. A lesson we learn as we begin to grow older, is that most of the worthwhile things in life are achieved by delaying gratification, and facing precisely the things that scare us. An adventure, by definition, is a journey carrying risk of harm or perhaps even death. It may seem absurd, as if we were Sisyphus, sentenced to pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down and being forced to repeat that same action for all eternity. Sometimes it's hard to find meaning because we were placed into this world barred from knowing, "why?" It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary. If this world is really controlled by the devil, I think that it's endearing that we're allowed to share our stories with others and experience both the pleasures and pains of living as a human. We are continually presented with the opportunity to choose what kinds of hurdles we like to overcome. Sometimes we may feel purposeless, as if everything we did, are doing, and will do is all for nothing. We probably won't ever know for certain God's true reasons for creating the material world. However, we get to create our own meaning, exploring and learning from the world around us to help us find our very own personal truth. We must imagine Sisyphus being happy. We must imagine that he is at peace, for he is the master of his fate. No one can fulfill Sisyphus's role better than he can.

We are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls, because we each have within us a "still-small voice" that is garnered from a higher order. Rise above fear, ignorance, and obscurity. Talk to your heart. Trust your intuition. For the daring, follow the omens that God left for us along each of our paths.

The only promise is the adventure.