15 How easy it is to make ourselves miserable…or happy!

This one is a simple no-brainer: we can make ourselves totally miserable, just thinking of all our ills, all the things we should have got, or done, or had done to us, the things that got lost, the deals we missed, the commissions or compliments we had to pay others, and so on.

It’s equally easy to make ourselves happy, or at least less miserable, by not thinking about these things, or by thinking the opposite type of things. Easy to say, but human nature being what it is, one loss outweighs all the gains: we tend to dwell on the negative, probably an evolutionary trait that must have been good in scanning the neighbourhood for threats to survival. Persons with a very strong long-term memory system (women are said to have this type) obviously have a tougher time doing this. 

I would look on those lost deals, the tips paid for poor service (or none at all), the wasted advance payments, the unrecoverable loans and unrequited gifts (including your first love affair!), as just paying your tithe in life! There has to be a certain amount of friction in life, that converts energy into useless heat; similarly, there are losses in transactions over a lifetime. Things don’t ever balance perfectly. The fact that you have your limbs and eyes and hearing is itself too much... you’re already far ahead in the game! All the rest is a bonus… and I say this from harsh personal experience, not as a general platitude.

Granted, these bits of “wisdom” sound like a string of homilies… but if so, they’re homilies, or bits of the experience of living, that have been propounded and expounded over the millennia, and have been tested and found effective. I will come to some of the old literature by and by, but in the meanwhile we can easily extract what little lessons are possible, from our own day-to-day, year-to-year experience.

We’ve seen people in front of our eyes, day by day, ruining themselves by doing some or all of the things we’ve been talking about… maybe they’re our loved ones in our own families! Maybe it’s your friend’s old man who had shut himself into a well of silence for fifty long years… maybe it’s a child who grows into a brat and then goes off the rails… maybe it’s a colleague at work who complains so much he has no time for anything else… we observe, we think about these things, and we draw lessons for our own conduct and attitudes.