when i first graduated college and started working i had a boss that liked to say the often repeated phrase, “life is change”. i am sure i had heard it before, but having your first boss use it, right after dropping a bomb of an announcement was a nice entry point into the reality of an adult with a career.
i have heard myself say the same words to staff over the past few weeks, which is a bit scary, somewhat like hearing yourself say, “because i am the dad and i say so” or something else your father may have been famous for saying, when you hear your parent come out of some deep dark place inside you it is a self-conscience moment that can take you back to your own childhood, and expose you to memories of a different time.
i was a camp counselor for a summer day camp when i was 16. i had gotten the job because i swam on swim team, and my coach was the camp manager. this was the first job i had with any responsibility beyond making sure a fast food item was not burned, or someone didn’t park in a reserved spot. this was also the first time my actions were impacting the emotions of people who looked up to or relied on me.
in this setting i found that people, little people with unstable home lives, needed to have as little change as possible. change is bad when you see the world though a tunnel of emotional breakage, worse when you have the capacity of an 10 – 12 year old to deal with it. it wasn’t long before i learned that my job was to look for problems before they happened and downplay anything that would upset the flow of one day to the next. keeping to routines was an important part of this, change for no good reason was not a plus.
wind forward decades in time and a huge physical distance. now i have new kids, who see the world though a lense very different than my own. again, i am finding that my job is to look for things on the horizon that would upset their balance and to explain the things that do happen in a way to limit the emotional impact.
the second part of “life is change” is “change is good”. not all change is good. there is change that is forced upon us, that we resist kicking and screaming. there is also change we realize we can not resist but we can also not live with so we simply walk away. there is change that we think we want, but when we realize the meaning of it we begin to wonder if the change was really what we wanted in the first place.
i have a new phrase that i have been repeating to myself for the past few months. “happiness is acceptance”, no matter what is happening if i accept the realities of the situation, i find that i feel better. if i want a coffee, and the coffee shop is closed, what can i do? i have two paths to follow, get upset or accept. if i get upset i might tell myself i am enjoying the release of tension, but i am really just making it worse. probably not just for myself, but for everyone around me.
the other approach is to simply accept. once you accept the reality of the situation you can embrace it and make it your own. i find myself smiling when this happens, i simply say, okay so i can’t have the coffee and start looking for an alternative or more likely just go home and have water. the water is better for me anyway, it’s cheaper, there are no nasty chemicals to worry about, and there is no post caffeine crash waiting on the other side. i might as well enjoy it, and realize it’s good for me.
talking about water and coffee is of course a metaphor for what ever you think i really am looking to find and accepting that i can’t have it. who cares about that, we can change the nouns all you want, there is something i cant have, and i can simply accept that and decide how to move forward.
life is change, happiness is accepting that and all of its implications. resisting it is a true course to feeling like a troubled kid in a summer camp run by councilors who don’t know what they are doing, who cant help you with the real problems in your life, but who try to keep the wheels rolling day by day. just making it to the end of the summer isn’t enough, life it too long to not except that the summer will be over and you need good memories to look back on to help you get though the winter.
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i might be wrong. but from your story and metaphor I dun think it really explains 'happiness is accepting". i dun think it is happiness. I think what you're trying to do is minimize your frustration by being complacent with your second choice. It didn't bring happiness but it teach you to have less expectation over time. less expectation leads to less frustration. less frustration equal to happy? if that so, no expectation will lead to total happiness? i dun believe that we will find happiness in mundane-ness. but, well, tht just me.
ReplyDeletecomplaining that you can't find what you want is no reason to stop living, to stop trying other things. lower frustration levels are a good thing, but a lobotomy would give me that too, and i am not saying that is something i think is a good idea.
ReplyDeletei guess what i am saying is sometimes we need to accept that change happens, and change comes with choice. some choices we can't make or have the way we would want. its better not to thrash on that, but to enjoy the good moments that are there if we allow ourselves to see them.