You Can Only Balance Yourself and Your Life
Trying to balance other people’s lives will drive you mad.
I’m going to make a statement that you might not like to read, but it’s a true statement. The quest for happiness is seldom the true life quest that anyone undertakes.
What does that mean? It means that happiness, in and of itself, is not an end-all be-all matter. Happiness comes and goes, ebbs and flows. Often, something that makes you happy might have an instantaneous impact on you, but then it quickly fades. Not because it’s taken away by something, but because that’s the nature of happiness.
I’m not as cynical about happiness as some. There’s a classic Denis Leary comedy routine where his take on happiness is this:
“Happiness comes in small doses folks. It’s a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm.”
Leary concludes by telling you that the above is it, then it’s back to the grind. While I agree that all of the above are things that bring happiness, I think there is a lot more to happiness than such quick, finite snapshots.
More than that, though, I think there is a better, more achievable metric to strive for above and beyond happiness. That would be contentment and balance.
Content versus discontent
Spend any time at all online, and you will be bombarded by discontent.
People love to share their discontent on a broad scale. Sometimes it’s good to get people to see the problem with governments, unfair working conditions and expectations, terrible policies, and so on. The trouble comes when the discontent utterly dominates the conversation.
It can be even more problematic when people are sharing their discontent on a more personal level. Jobs, loved ones, friends, coworkers, children, you name it. Again, this can be good for asking for help or ideas, but troubling when it becomes your default life experience.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, experiences discontent in life. From the biggest to the smallest, so-called highest to the lowest, things happen that ruin contentment. That’s because so many things in life are utterly outside of your control.
Other people, the environment, random happenstance, the weather, traffic – and numerous other shit that happens is utterly out of your control. To be fair, that won’t always lead to things that make you discontent, or worse. But recognizing and acknowledging them is important to your overall mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health, wellness, and wellbeing.
Finding things that make you feel content is a lot easier than you might realize. That’s because content is found within, not without. Sure, there are outside things that certainly help you feel content. But nothing outside of yourself makes you experience contentment. That comes from inside of you.
The car, the house, the job, the money – none of these will make you feel content. That’s not to say that they don’t help, but they are not what brings contentment. You draw it from within yourself.
How? By finding balance.
Finding balance in a world of imbalance
Balance is not the ability to stand on one foot. This is the ability to recognize and acknowledge the discontent, unhappiness, and other negatives while seeking/finding/creating things that make you feel and experience contentment.
Being content isn’t just a matter of feeling. It’s a choice to seek things that make you feel calm, collected, unhurried, and balanced.
This is where toxic positivity tends to rear its ugly head. Toxic positivity tells you to ignore, disregard, and deny the negative. But you can’t, because both are part of the fabric of the universe. You cannot have one without the other. They are the yin and yang, the black and white, short and tall, opposite ends of a given spectrum.
Remember, most of us exist between any and all given extremes. That’s part of why finding balance is so important.
You, and only you, know what makes you feel good. Only you know what makes you feel content. Hence, only you can find and balance your life, for you. If you don’t do it, nobody else can.
So, if you are more discontent than content, you alone have the power to find balance and change that. How? Two things.
First – become aware of your 6 senses. Screen time doesn’t engage the senses apart from sight and sound. So, take a moment to engage your other senses, too. That’s the first step to find and/or create balance.
Secondly – become aware of your active, conscious awareness. This is done by you recognizing and acknowledging what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, if your approach is positive or negative, what your intentions are, and what actions you do or don’t take.
This is something you, and only you, can do for yourself. And you can only do it for you.
You can only balance yourself and your life
No matter who it is, or how close you might be, you cannot make anyone else find balance or contentment in their life.
This is important to remember because it will save you a lot of time and frustration. In a world where people are doing incredibly unkind, selfish, careless, and unempathetic things, you will be exposed to discontent, imbalance, and worse. This can lead to feeling lost, sad, frustrated, afraid, uncertain, and hopeless.
You can’t balance anyone else outside of you. But you can seek and find balance for yourself. When you do that, you open yourself up to a lot of potential, possibility, and contentment for yourself.
Contentment allows you to find greater balance for yourself. When you have more balance, that can help other people find balance in their lives. That’s because balanced people are beacons for others.
Sure, some people see that beacon, that light, as a bug-zapper or oncoming train. You can’t do anything to impact them until they choose to see a beacon as a source of comfort, kindness, compassion, and hope. But for anyone else, you can be an example of balance and contentment that they might seek to emulate. In that way alone, you can help others and help the world at large.
Finding and/or creating balance for yourself isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that you’re the only one inside of your head, heart, and soul, you become capable of finding and/or creating things that make you experience contentment and balance. Knowing that your contentment and balance can be a beacon for others, you can work on your active conscious awareness – mindfulness – to expand on this for more kindness, compassion, and empathy within and without.
This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, that can spread to those around you for their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred-and-ninety-second (592) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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