by Patrick Bailey
12. Laugh!
"Life sucks and all I have is my positive attitude."
If you haven't laughed in a while, you are spiritually deprived and not letting go of the stresses in your life. Laughter can only come to you if you let it. Let laughter come to you and let it have its way with you! When you laugh, other people are happy, too. Laughter is the universal language.
I don't just mean the guffaws that come from watching a comedian or a funny movie. I include the lightness of attitude that friends can give us. Laughter is a physical reaction and we all know what it feels like. But it is more than that. To develop the laughter in your life you need friends and a way of looking at the world that can relieve you of any burden you may have. I think that's what laughter does. It is a release and it feels good.
You don't have to hire a comedian to follow you around and tell you jokes all day to keep up a laughing spirit. It's possible to have the internal feeling, not of physical laughter, but of the lightness that comes from releasing the heaviness of some of the burdens we carry. I think friends and family help us do this by just talking about themselves. There's something about listening to someone we love that relieves us of our petty concerns. I think of it is as a form of laughter, a subtle form, but an even more exquisite form. It's empathy and it's sympathy and it's a way of looking at things that gives us a smile. It's a way of opening up to the other perspectives that we might be missing. It's a way of sharing the human condition with those we love. It's even a way to laugh at ourselves and our seriousness and even our anger, when a friend can look at us in that way that tells us that we are overreacting to some problem in life. Don't let go of that feeling and never forget that it can be there for you at any time.
There is no rule of law and no police force that is endowed with the authority to arrest you if you don't take everything seriously. That tendency is coming from inside you, from the way you may be frustrated with the world around you or with the other people in it. Don't let this make you a sour person. Don't let it burst that little bubble of happiness that you have inside you. Keep that bubble and look at it and be glad that it's there and cherish it and never let anyone take it away from you. It's yours!
Imagine that there are places in your heart for different feelings. The "Worry Building" is probably as big an airplane hangar with forklifts bringing in new stuff all the time. It's a cold, draughty place and your little voice echoes off the giant ceiling. It's a place where you can feel small and helpless. Let's get of there for a little while, go out into the fresh air and find ourselves a little "Laughing Place."
In our Laughing Place, we'll sit down by a river and let the sun bathe our face and body. Gently remember all the nice things that people have done for you and how you shared those happy moments and laughed with each other. Remember their eyes as they laughed. Let your heart be happy and light. Listen to the river and it's calming sound. Close your eyes and imagine that you are hugging your best friend who has just told you that she loves you. Open your eyes and look off into the distance and you will see that giant, ugly Worry Building. Get up and walk for a while until you can sit by the river and not see the Worry Building at all. Sit back down and throw a pebble into the river. Watch the ripples gently stir for a moment and watch the wind ripple through the willow tree. A bird is singing. A feeling in your heart is singing. Put a little marker down and stake your claim to this Laughing Place. It's now yours and you can come back to it anytime you want to.
13. Don't Expect Others to Solve Your Problems
One of the keys to success is to realize that you generate your own momentum. By using your will and your talents and by working, you create your life and you change the world. It's easy to think that you are simply a victim of circumstances or that you must wait "until your ship comes in." But that is false and that thinking will keep you "becalmed on the sea of life." You must set sail each morning and you must guide your own vessel. You must be in the captain's cabin keeping the log and staying on course. Your life is not what happens to you; your life is what you can make happen around you. Don't ask yourself, "What good thing can happen to me today?" but rather "What good thing can I make happen for me today."
There are some parts of our lives that we actively control and some that we leave to chance. What color socks we will get from our grandmother at Christmas is something that we leave to chance. That's outside our control and grandmother has good taste anyway. But there are other things in our lives that we might be leaving to chance which belong in the "under our control" category. There's an item called "What Kind of Life Am I Going To Have?" that some people have in there with grandmother's sock selection.
It's true that in our early years many things are decided for us. Most everything really. We can't help it if it becomes a habit. In fact, it's better that we not fight against it too strongly in our early years. But after we have grown into adults and have our own jobs and are allowed to go out by ourselves into the big wide world, we need to come to a realization. We need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves who is in charge of our life? Is your boss in charge of your life? Is your spouse in charge of your life? Is your aerobics instructor running your life? Have you let these people assume the status of authority figures that you remember from your youth?
A related issue here is the tendency for some people to look to others to help them forget their problems. This is what our friends do and this is healthy when it is part of the pattern of our give and take with them and part of a mutual understanding with humor and sharing. It gives us a sounding board and it helps us to get back into the battle of life. It's not meant to solve our problem but to give us a way of releasing our stress and anxiety. We need friends to understand us and to listen to "our side of the story."
But there are situations where people seek out people who help them "solve" their problems by providing an avenue of forgetfulness which can slide into irresponsibility. If you have ever gone into a bar in the early afternoon and seen a group of people around the bar, it's possible that these individuals are confusing the health of friendship and camaraderie with the delusions of escape and false answers. The bar becomes a place where a person goes to forget and not to deal with things. The patrons at the bar participate in a ritual which is not the way to deal with life's problems or the way to have friends in your life.
True friends will have your best interest in mind when they talk to you. They may not know you well enough to always be right in their advice to you. But the counsel they give is meant to make your life better and to give your morale a boost. But if a friend engages in destructive behavior like a reliance on alcohol or other drugs, it's time to re-evaluate your relationship with that person.
It's a funny thing but the most treasured thing in the world, friendship, can change into a destructive force in your life if you become dependent on someone who does not put your best interest first in his mind. It probably would not be because they were evil people, but because they were weak and they needed someone like you to share in their dysfunctional behavior. It's hard to choose between a friend and their behavior but it's crucial to the fundamental concept of friendship.
I was taught this by a girlfriend I had when I was in my '20s. She was worried that I was drinking too much with my male friends and that I should stop. I did stop. I tried to continue the friendships with my old buddies, drinking non-alcoholic drinks, but it soon proved impossible. The drinking had indeed been a "prerequisite" for their friendship and if I did not want to indulge in their behavior, I was not really welcome. The phone calls from them stopped. I got the message. My girlfriend had been right. What I had seen as mutual support and friendship had been corrupted by alcohol and they were not able to be my true friends. That girlfriend taught me what a true friend was and she was one to me. She did not have to involve herself in the situation, which I know she knew beforehand would become tangled and messy and involve hurt feelings since I always talked about my former drinking friends as the greatest buddies I could have. But she did involve herself. She cared enough about me to risk that. At first I thought perhaps she was jealous of my male friends and all the time I spent with them. But I came to see the truth of her wisdom and a friendship like hers is something that I wish for everyone in the world. It truly changed my life.
Some people have neglected developing themselves by depending too much on others for their feelings of security. We have to feel secure within ourselves. Otherwise we have no real identity. We are not operating on the world with our share of purpose and strength when we depend on others to give us a good feeling about ourselves. We can't turn our responsibility for making something out of our life over to someone else. There are times when we will be confused and not know the correct thing to do in our lives. We will seek the counsel of our friends. That is only human and it's good to get other perspectives on a situation. But if we are expecting others to tell us what we should do, then we have gone too far. Or, more correctly, we haven't gone anywhere. We have confused our own will with someone else's. We have said, in effect, "You are a friend who knows how to get your life together. Now, will you please tell me how I can do that for myself?"
Imagine if you took this tendency to its extreme. You had to call your friend for each decision every day, even what food you were going to eat for lunch. That's what happens when you are in prison! If you are giving your will and independence over to someone else by surrendering the responsibility for your own life, you are volunteering to be in prison. They will tell you what to do there. Every little thing will be decided for you. Is that what you want? It's time you walked out of there and started your life. No one can stop you if you just keep moving. Only you can decide to go back into that cell of dependence and isolation from your true self and its potential.
We've heard the stories about longtime prisoners who sometimes want to return to prison after they get out and find they cannot adjust to the world. Maybe they had an easy job in the prison library and spent a lot of time reading and just lying around dreaming. Then the outside world life is complicated and they have to make a living and meet people and worry over where their rent money is coming from. "I'd rather be back in that prison library reading my book," they think. They have given up hope that they can become more than what they are at any given time in their life. They have decided to just cope for the rest of their lives. This is an extreme example. What about someone who is in a relationship or a job which has been keeping them stagnated but in which they have grown comfortable? How close is this person to the prisoner who wants to go back to prison? Is the fear of change too much to bear against the comfortability of a routine? What is it about the routine that is so attractive? That it is safe and predictable? It was pretty safe and predictable in our mother's womb? Is that where we wanted to stay?
The world can be a hard place to find one's way. When we get stuck in a rut, become accustomed to it, arrange our schedules around it, develop a social life around it, and so on, we might think that we have found all that we can in life. What we have actually found is a way for us to deny the potential in ourselves and to escape the fears of fully using that potential. The world is out there; we didn't create it but we must live in it. It needs us to make it better. We can't make it better by escaping from it into our little corner and pretending that the larger world doesn't exist.
A question for each of us is: "Is life too hard for me or am I making it too hard for myself by my actions or inactions?" We sometimes think that only actions have consequences so that if we don't do anything, we don't have to worry about the results. But if we are passing up our opportunities by not acting on our talents we are going to get consequences also. We will be creating an environment of frustration and hopelessness for ourselves which we may blame on the world failing to recognize us in all our splendor.
There are many challenges that we will face in life. The first step in each one is to recognize and accept that these challenges are our personal responsibility. We must own our own responsibilities and not try to give them away to someone else or turn them over to fate. If fate were going to solve all your problems you needn't ever have been born. Fate is just another word for giving up and not trying to work your own solution.
There is one good thing about feeling miserable in your life. It's a sure indicator that you have to change the way you approach and live your life. It's nature's way of telling you that you are on the wrong track. Being miserable is not something that is natural for you and you shouldn't become inured to it. It's only a sign that things should change. It's not "in you" to stay and it will leave you if you take the steps necessary to regain your proper place in the universe.
Responsibility makes makes us think of things like paying the bills and caring for a child. Serious things, like making sure that others can rely on us. But there is another side to responsibility. We are also responsible for our own happiness. We must seek out what brings us joy and not wait until joy finds us somehow. We can't wait for the "happiness train" to stop and tell us to get on board. You are the one who is driving the train! We are the engineers of our own happiness. We can blame the world for our own unhappiness but it won't make the world feel sorry for us and make us happy. We have to do that for ourselves.
14. Concentrate on Long-range Goals; Minimize Desire for Instant Gratification
A child wants what is in front of her. A woman wants what her heart can dream of. The child quickly loses interest in something. The woman can sustain a dream for her entire life. You must have a goal in life, if only to be the best person you can be. (And that's a very worthy goal.) Pursue your goal each day and never get tired of your dream. If your dream seems impossible, put it away for a while and come back to it later. You are entitled to more than one dream per lifetime. You are the one to decide what your heart desires.
Dreams can be like cars, sometimes they might need to go into the shop for a while for a thorough tune-up. Chip away any unnecessary rust on your dream and put a brand-new paint job on it. If your dream is an old classic, you might want to just leave it the way it is. If you see another dream in the showroom of life that you fancy, write out a check and drive it home! There is no limit to how many dreams you can have and you don't have to go through a credit-check to buy the most outlandish dream in the world.
But if you are only serving your emotions and moods and focusing on your immediate feelings, then instant gratification is perfectly suited to you. Drugs which increase feelings of well-being make a lot of sense if all you want from life is one "high" after another. The mind is no match for the feelings which are so powerful under these circumstances. People think of this kind of life as an escape, but I don't think that's the right word. To me, a true escape is to get out of a trap and into the freedom each individual is capable of. To be a slave to your feelings or to drugs is not an escape by this definition. True, it "feels" like an escape. It feels like you are in perfect control and in tune with the universe. This is yet another reason why feelings cannot govern our actions. There is simply no way around the fact that you need to use your mind and your judgment. Your judgment is what you really are; it's your identity as a person. To pervert your judgment through the abuse of drugs is to abdicate your identity and to give up trying to be the person you can become.
If you had 24 hours to live and you were on death row and your last-minute appeal for a stay of execution failed, would you want to take drugs? What if they offered you enough drugs to keep you in a pleasant stupor for the duration of your life before they injected you with a fatal dose of poison? In this scenario it actually makes sense to concentrate on instant gratification. Your rational mind admits that there is no hope for your future and planning your life won't make any difference. Your rational mind tells you that it is up to you: It doesn't make any difference, you're going to be dead in 24 hours.
But a part of you answers, yes, it does make a difference. That part of you is struggling with your situation. You don't want drugs. You don't want to feel better. You want time to think. You want your judgment, every ounce of it. You want the opportunity to think about your life and what will happen after you're gone and how you ever got into this mess in the first place. You want to be "who you really are" for your last day on earth.
This is a morbid example but if drugs don't appeal to you in this scenario, when they actually do make sense, then how can they make sense when you have a whole life to live? A word that is important to understand is persistence. We learn early that persistence isn't always enough. In our early years we are told to persist and sometimes we simply cannot grasp the intricacies of mathematics or science. Despite how hard we might try at some endeavors we cannot always succeed. So we come to doubt the value of persistence. It becomes more like beating one's head against a wall and we are leery of the word "persistence" for the rest of our lives.
Persistence alone isn't enough to bring our talents to bear upon the world. We have to learn where our talents are and then be persistent in using them. Then persistence becomes not only important but the key to whether we succeed or not. If we are looking for instant success in our chosen field, and if we then remember how persistence failed us in the past in something we were not suited for, we may mistakenly think that our talents cannot overcome obstacles in our path. If your life plan is a radio with one battery in it, you only have so much time to play that radio before it fades out. But if you take your "talent" (radio) and plug it into the wall outlet, the one marked "persistence," then you can play that radio for the rest of your life. The talent you are born with and develop in your life needs to get plugged into that persistence inside you; it can't sustain itself on its own. It will go dead. You have to bond those two things together with a welding torch. You put those two together and fire up the turbochargers and you're going over that mountain.
Someone might respond as follows: "I tried to change my life plan but nobody seemed to care much. My boss still frustrated me and my wife is only concerned that I get that promotion that I told her I was up for. I'm only one person and I can't change everyone around me. I got sick of trying and went out and got drunk and felt much better when I just quit trying to be so perfect. All I can do is hold on and enjoy what few pleasures I can find like going out with my friends. They don't put pressure on me, they just accept me the way I am."
There is nothing wrong with coping with setbacks or having friends to be around and tell your stories to. Life would be impossible without that. But if the whole deal, your complete life, is under the category of "something to be coped with," then you have squeezed out the possibilities that you can create for yourself. You have set up the formula like this: "Life equals a problem. Problems are solved by coping. Therefore life consists of coping." What's wrong with that equation? Nothing if you accept the first two statements, which are both half-truths. How about stating the formula this way: "Life is a rich adventure that contains problems. I deal with problems using my creative self. Therefore, problems help me to discover myself." I like the sound of that better. Problems are sometimes so large, or come at such bad times, that coping is the only answer. But we can't live our entire lives that way. It just leaves too much out of the universe that is there for us. We need to play a larger role in the world than someone who endures his problems.
15. Invest Everything in Yourself and Believe in Your Stock!
Every time you want to give up on yourself, you have to have a "shareholders meeting" with yourself. You are the principal shareholder of your own stock and you make the decisions. If things aren't going right, maybe you need a new plan. You might want to invest in some training for yourself. You may wish to diversify and buy a cabin in the woods. You may want to expand your operations into new directions. Or you might just ride out the market and let the world come to appreciate your value. If you supply value to the world, your stock will rise accordingly.
If there is one belief that is crucial to your life plan it is that you have something to offer the other people in the world. If you don't believe that then you will not see the responsibility that you have to offer it. If you don't think you can add anything to what is already there then you will feel superfluous, like someone who was born for no reason. It's good to be needed by other people. It makes us feel worthy. We can't be needed by other people if we offer nothing of ourselves to them. We can't go out into the desert and say, "I will come out when I'm needed." You will never be needed if you don't make your presence felt in the world. People need to be connected to something. Religion comes from the Latin word religio which means bond. We need each other. In the words of Bob Dylan, "Name me somebody who isn't a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him." I can't explain it any better than that great poet and singer.
But being connected to other people does not mean that we become dependent on other people for our identity. We must remain independent and in charge of our lives while we seek to connect to others and provide them with what we have and receive from them what they have for us. In connecting to someone significant in our lives we don't give that person the power to tell us who we are. We need to be strong ourselves and not need to define our existence by our relationship with others. Only then can our personalities become complete. No matter how close we get to another person we mustn't forget our ultimate responsibility is to ourselves. That doesn't mean we don't give of ourselves to the other person. We can give all we want because we are secure in ourselves and the act of giving does not make us smaller but it makes us larger and fuller and stronger than ever. We can give because we have something in us that doesn't run out. We have in our hearts the understanding and the love and the humility that comes with accepting and loving ourselves, with all our faults, and in putting ourselves to work on the world.
Conclusion
These are 15 ways to get in tune with what's around you, commonly called the world and other people. You are at the center, but that does not mean that it revolves around you. Take a deep breath and look out at your world. You are a big part of it and you are in control of your own destiny. Enjoy your life and love yourself for who you are.
I didn't write this book to take the fun out of your life. I didn't fill it up with exercises on how you have to do things. I don't like reading books like that myself. I don't like being told what to do. I just want to suggest perspectives that will help you to be comfortable in your life and to share your life with others. Some people are naturally more assertive than others. We can't escape our natures and I don't suggest that we try. I want to add to what's there, not take anything away. If you are a warm and caring person then I hope you enjoyed this book and please "don't change a hair for me," as the song goes.
All right, I will give you one exercise. Find a quiet place and sit down or lie down. Be comfortable. Let your mind slow down a little. Say to yourself: "I am not my doubts. I am not my fears. I am not my desires. I am myself." Say it slowly and then pause. Say it out loud and then pause. Just relax and do this as long as you want.
If you have difficulty enjoying your life, then I hope this book has helped you to see that you have a lot of potential and that it's never too late to change attitudes that don't bring out the best in ourselves. There are plenty of good reasons for feeling miserable in the world but you don't have to feel miserable just because there are good reasons for it. You can create your own reasons for feeling vibrant and alive and connected to the world. It does take work and effort to do this. It takes time. But it took a long time for you to grow into an adult and the work's not over yet. The growing doesn't stop just because you don't get any taller.
I think of it sort of as a relay race. My parents put a lot of love and patience and work into getting me out into the world and then they passed the baton to me. I feel a duty to build on what they have already done for me. I want to succeed because they "succeed with me." And it's the same with everyone that I'm connected with. I want to succeed for them and I want them to succeed for me. You can be sad and miserable all by yourself but it's more fun to succeed with others.
The world and the people in it are complicated topics. Philosophers have spent a lot of time trying to come up with theories about it. Who is exploiting whom, and who is on the top and who is on the bottom, and maybe the whole thing needs to be overhauled. There have always been winners and losers in the struggle for power and money. The world has had its share of ugliness and grief and many people have had nothing but sorrow in the world.
I think of the robin in the tree in the morning outside my window. He doesn't sing because his life is easy or because he got a promotion or even because he just gulped down a big fat worm. He sings because the sun comes up.
My hope in writing this book has been to talk about thoughts and feelings and how they affect us. I haven't mentioned spirituality very much, but this is really what this book has been about. Informing everything that I have written has been the desire to free you from the limits that mundane concerns, worries, and desires impose upon you while you try to discover your real identity. If I had called this book "15 Ways to Make Your Identity Real" it would have sounded like a parody of a psychology book. But how can we have a real attitude if we don't have a real identity? How can we find our identity in this world full of worry and care? We will never find it on that level alone. We have to go someplace higher in ourselves to find our true identity. We have to forsake the world in a very real way to find ourselves. It's serious business for us and no one can do it for us. If you want to keep tooling around in the day-to-day world with all its concerns and hope to find your identity there, I wish you luck. If you can step back from that for a while each day, and think with your heart and let your mind hold onto the truly important things in your life, then you are on your way.
On our spiritual journey we find ourselves in a big world and it has lots of other people in it. We have hopes and dreams and fears and loves and pain. We have needs and we have strengths; we have weaknesses and we have friends. We have our families. We look around us and see what amazing things have already been created. We feel humble and we don't know why we have been brought into the world. From our first step as an infant until it's all over, we navigate through a whirl of emotions and thoughts. We will sometimes forget what we can become. We'll get distracted with fear and worry. It will be enough some days to just survive until we can find our bearings again. But we have it within ourselves to continue our work in the world. We can laugh along the way. I hope you have someone special that you can share the experience with.
(Now to return to that story which began this book. I won't ask you at which position you found your switch, or if you had correctly guessed where it had been positioned. I do hope that you moved it to the center position and let the light go white. That's the only position any of us can ask for, and it's the only position from which we can create our own identity and our own life.)
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