Another Blog Post one from A Daily Dose of Happiness…and this one is ideal to forward to anybody who might be feeling a little down. Share it with your Twitter and FaceBook friends, too. Some of them will appreciate it…
Up escalator. Down escalator. No, that’s not the name of a new Dr. Seuss book. It’s a pairing of two very handy mechanisms that are both quite necessary. True, we could survive without escalators, but we would still need to go up and down stairs…you can’t just keep going up.
In life, we need both ups and downs. If you plan to chase happiness means that you’ll try to avoid all downs, you are in for trouble.
Downs are inevitable. Things happen that just don’t go your way, and human beings are hard wired to react. When someone close to you passes away or just goes away, you are supposed to feel down. When someone hurts you. When a friend fails. When you fail. When traffic is particularly thick or your wallet is particularly thin. There are so many times when you will feel down.
Yes, even the happiest people feel down.
But a happy person does not stay down long. A happy person moves fairly soon from mourning a loss to celebrating a life. From feeling like a failure to grasping the lesson and renewing his determination. From feeling frustrated to just letting the universe unfold.
Up. Down. They are both fine – the question is how long you stay down.
I recently published “Your Unfinished Life”, designed to serve as a guide to finding happiness, personal fulfillment and peace of mind through kindness. There are many ways to be happy, and by that I don’t just mean “feel good”, but finding true personal fulfillment and gratification in life. This is just one of the routes endorsed by positive psychologists. What you say is very true. No one is going to be happy all of the time, and from what I’ve read, it wouldn’t be a desirable circumstance for someone to be in even if they were, nor would it be conducive to their personal growth. There would be no motivation to grow if things were always going just the way we wanted them to.
Most of us feel sadness or are depressed, at least sometimes. The problem is when we stay that way too long as a result of someone’s death, the end of a relationship or loss of a job, for instance. One of the best remedies I’ve found is to look for someone else to help. We can’t always solve our own problems, but we might be able to help someone else with theirs. (I mention “40 Ways To Be Kind” in one of the book’s chapters.) It buoys them up and helps renew our own power that helps us to heal. You can’t always get help, but you can aways give it, and that adds to our own self-esteem and personal growth. Anyone can do that whether they are people of faith, or of none, simply because they’re a good person. For those who rely on religion or some form of spirtuality, that can provide an additional boost to finding peace of mind and helping us to get back on our feet when finding peace seems elusive.
Ah yes, the ebb and flow of life. We wouldn’t know what the ups were if we didn’t have the downs to compare them to.
The escalator comparison is interesting but I don’t totally agree with it. The difference lies in the fact that everywhere there is an up escalator, there is one that goes down; except that life has more ups than downs. There isn’t a balance between the two. We all experience lows, pain and suffering, but they give us opportunities to grow as humans. Having such a perception on life, allows you to look at the lows from a different angle, thus realizing, that your highs significantly outweigh the lows. Don’t you think?