Living Happiness

When  I woke up this morning, I had this post all planned out in my head: peppy little title, aptly chosen opening quote, hand-picked personal anecdotes, and all my key points lined up in a little row.  Ta-Da!  This was going to be simple.

But, as I sat down and put fingers to keyboard, I realized that what I was going to write about was both of these things:

A.  a load of hooey

B.  already beaten to death by all of the other blogs out there

For you see, I was going to write about failure.  Success and failure, actually, and all of the great and marvelous things that can be said about it (and have been … to the death), which is Reason Number One why this post is not going to take that tack after all.

Reason Number Two: As I started writing my list of “failures” to share with you, I couldn’t believe the kind of silliness I was writing down.  “Seriously?” my Inner Voice piped up, “You’re putting down your chipped toenail polish as a failure?  God, if that’s all it takes then everybody in the world might as well curl up and die.  Why don’t you put ‘gray roots, need dye job’ on the list, too, just for posterity,” as she contemptuously snorted.

I looked at my list and she was right: it was utterly ridiculous the kinds of things I was setting down there as failures.  Imperfections, maybe, but failures?  Not a chance.

And that’s when my Inner Voice, having sufficiently calmed herself into some modicum of decorum (she had been laughing loud enough to beat the band), chimed in again: “You’re confusing imperfection with failure.  But if imperfection and failure were the same, we would have all had to hang it up a long time ago.  Lighten up already!”

Damn it.  She was right again.  But I was glad she was, because it was no fun sitting and feeling like the world’s biggest loser … and all because I was 1) trying to take myself too seriously and 2) trying to be perfect instead of just being me.

How many of us do this, though?  And often?

We read our feel-good magazines, we devour the articles in wellness and personal-development blogs, and then we measure our successes against the standard set before us only to come up short.

We don’t have time to meditate every day, we can’t afford to eat all organic all the time, we fight with our spouse or children or boss or best friend, we carry on the business of living all day long and hope that there’s time for us at the end … only to find, all too often, that there’s not.

We know what we “should” do.  We know what the happy perfect life looks like.  Why can’t we attain it?

Because we’re not perfect, and we’re not asked to be.  We’re simply asked to show up today and be.  Really.

Be.

There’s only one us, and we’re not perfect but we’re here.  And there’s a reason for it.  And we’re going to mess up and make mistakes and have unpainted toenails and dust bunnies in our houses and piles of dishes in our sink and all kinds of things still hanging out on our To-Do list that we never seem to get to, but that doesn’t make us failures.

Today, I would like to ask you give you permission to take yourself off the hook.  Nobody thinks you need to be perfect but you.

And I would like to leave you with these two reflections:

Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. ~Ieyasu Tokugawa

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell. ~Ben Okri

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

How do you welcome your imperfections?

How do you deal with perceived failures?

Namaste,

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I was on the treadmill, busting into my second half-hour of cardio the other day when it came on, the familiar DUNT. Dunt-dunt-dunt. Dunt-dunt-dunt. Dunt-dunt-DUNNNNNH, with the helicopter-like electric guitar thrumming as an undercurrent in the background.

Risin’ up, back on the street,
Did my time, took my chances

Aw, yeah.  Nothing like a bit of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” to get me going.

“Eye of the Tiger” is a very popular song here at the gyms in Greece.  You can’t show up at one (any one) of them and not be serenaded by “Tiger” at least once during your weight training circuit.  But I must shamelessly admit that, on this particular day, this particular rendition came to me courtesy of my iPod and not the speakers at Planet Fitness.  Yes, my name is Chania Girl, and far too many of my workout tunes are songs that last reached their peak in the ’80s.  A little Poison, anyone?  Def Leppard?  I know.  It’s sad really.

But I love “Eye of the Tiger.”  It’s catchy, it’s edgy, it’s nostalgic. And it also has these great lines (in my humble opinion, anyway) which get me every time:

So many times, it happens too fast.
You trade your passion for glory.

So true.  I’ve had far too many moments lately where this has definitely been the case.  Trading passion for glory.  Going after the glitz and glamour … and forgetting all about the joy of simply doing what I love.  Wanting the reward with the least amount of effort.  And all this got me thinking.

As a lot of you know, I’m a word-lover, a philologos in the truest sense of the word, and words and meaning are everything to me: nuance, history, art, and mystery.  They thrill me to my very core.

So when I got home, I began doing some digging into the treasure trove of language (thesaurus, by the way, comes from the Greek word for treasure) and discovered these things about passion and glory that I would like to share with you.

First, you can’t have passion without patience.  And you can’t have either one without suffering.  Really.  It’s true.  Look these words up for yourself and you will find that the very root of both passion and patience is the same: the Latin word pati which literally means to undergo, to endure, to suffer.

But when was the last time we heard anything like this?  “Live your passion.”  “Be your passion,” we are admonished on an almost-daily basis (especially if you watch Oprah like I do).  But how many people are also saying, “Oh, and by the way, in doing so, be prepared to suffer”?  Maybe some.  Okay, maybe a few.  But the message might be more clear if what we heard was the literal translation:

“Live your suffering. Be your suffering.”

You see, there can be no prize, there can be no glory, without passion.  And there can be no passion without patience, without suffering … even though we’d really like for this not to be true.

Ask any person who has achieved something worthwhile, who has truly “lived” his/her passion and they will tell you that the road to glory is a long one and that it is fraught with obstacles and perils and battles to what feel like the death.

For most people, glory doesn’t come quickly or easily.  It comes behind a lot of blood, sweat and tears, the result of patience (again) that carries implicit within its meaning the idea of suffering.  You’ve all seen Rocky; you know what I’m talking about:  You have to go through the fight to get to the prize. You have to withstand life’s punches to be granted any praise.

And herein lies my second big discovery of the day: praise and prize are both related to the word price.  In fact, it was only during the 14th century that the three words (praise, prize, and price) began to diverge from one another to become the separate cognates we have today.  And what is price?

Price is the cost of something.  And cost?  Ah, again, the muse of language stepped in and answered: Cost is standing, not moving, remaining firm.

Cost, ironically, is the word closest in meaning to our word “patience” today.  Cost is planting your feet and standing your ground, instead of running when things get tough.

When troubles come your way, when agonies force themselves upon you, you bear the cost by standing firm.  Your bearing the cost, your willingness to stand, is your making a conscious decision not to flee.  It is your choosing to plant your feet in the path of destiny and say, “I’m not moving.” And it is this stance that helps you receive the blows life deals you … and deliver your own punches right back as you fight to keep your dream alive.

This, therefore, is the suffering that becomes known as patience.  And it is this patience that births one’s passion, a passion which, if fought for, becomes one’s prize: that hard-earned trophy that represents the cost of all you’ve stood for.

If you are daunted today by the task in front of you.   If you want to live your passion but feel beset by obstacles, know that this is not an aberration of nature.   Obstacles are built into the heart of passion itself.  But don’t let this deter you from going after your dream.  The prize at the end will be well worth the effort, for that reward will carry within it all of the suffering you may have endured.  And isn’t this worth more than a free trophy any day?

Please share your thoughts today.

What has living your passion meant for you?

What obstacles have you faced on the road to your dream?

What dreams do you have that are worth fighting for?

All of your comments are welcome.

Strength and grace to you today,

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