You Can Be Happy With A Quiet Life
Some people know from childhood what they will be like when they grow up, what it will be like “when they grow up.” Others find it a bit more difficult to decide their path, but most, if not all, go through the same thing: what am I going to do with my life. Being happy is then outlined to achieve a goal. Few will tell you that when they grow up they want a quiet life. In fact, what kind of goal is that?
Our culture seems to be intensely focused on passion and dreams. For example, if you look at the most popular programs on television, you will realize that they are the ones in which people compete for the opportunity to live their dreams.
It seems that the idea that success, being the first, achieving being more than anyone else, achieving what no one has achieved before, fulfilling a dream is what we must do. Nobody tells us the price that many times we have to pay for it, much less that we can have other objectives. Having a quiet life is also an option.
The ego’s constant desire to be special
Not always having a gift and a talent is a blessing, it doesn’t necessarily make you happy. In today’s society it seems that, if you do something well, you have to exploit it, make it available to whoever wants to judge it and make a living from it (and, incidentally, allow others to do it too). They sell us the idea that this talent makes us special and that we need to show it to the world.
The same goes for people with high intellectual capacity. In one way or another, the more intelligent a person is, the more they are pushed to “have a great career” or to study something more complex. Oddly enough, the options are narrowed, because so much talent for studies cannot be “wasted”. You can’t waste so much talent being happy.
Not getting everything you want can be a blessing
It is easy to dream of a happy and wonderful life, full of professional and personal recognition, great luxuries that you can afford thanks to your great work and a lot of opportunities to have a dream life, the kind we see on television. The truth is that we usually base ourselves on that when setting our goals. We believe it has to be that way.
But many times we become so obsessed with getting what we want or what is expected of us that we forget many things that remain along the way. In this search for success, we load ourselves with stress, our personal relationships are affected by the achievement of these goals, and it is easy to neglect our emotional and even spiritual aspects.
Surely you can think of many examples of people who are at the top, who have managed to reach spectacular levels of success, who are benchmarks in their profession, but who live at the limit of their physical strength and their sanity, not to mention your health. People who are subjected to great pressure and who, for one reason or another, have no choice but to continue like this, despite everything, they have no option for change.
But surely you also know of people who, for whatever reason, stopped pursuing their goals to change their lives and who gained from the change or who simply had to stop what they were doing. Those are the ones this quote refers to.
The key here is to be flexible to take the blows and take advantage of failure to grow internally, to look more within oneself and not just beyond. What do you want from life, to be or to have? Accepting the cards that life gives you can allow you to play an exceptional game.
The fundamental purpose of life is to seek happiness
Is being happy really a viable goal in our environment? Deep down, we all know that it is difficult, at least under the conditions imposed by today’s society and with the general tendency that we have to complicate our lives. Simplifying some things can be a great opportunity to seek that desired happiness.
Each one must seek the way in which they want to seek that path, without feeling guilty for taking one path or another and respecting the path that others decide to take.
