You Win for a While and Then.............

You win the game and for a while, things are different. ... texture of your experience changes and you say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it; now I will be happy". ... Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Then your face frowns, and you start hearing small voices, " your doing the wrong thing", "hit harder", "hold on, Let is go "  There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meet somehow and look OK from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance now and then. You get a good job. You fall in love. You win the game and for a while, things are different. Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and humdrum fade away. The whole texture of your experience changes and you say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it; now I am Happy and  I will be happy". But then that fades, too, like smoke in the wind. You are left with just a memory. That and a vague awareness that something is wrong.

In my own personal journey of trying to be a better person, I realized that it was all about aiming to be happy. Nothing more, nothing less. When you’re happy, you’re effectively better in every aspect of your life.
The second realization is that happiness comes from shedding the unnecessary in life, as in you need to stop caring about certain things.The third realization? A lot of these unnecessary things are painfully obvious. More often than not, it’s plain common sense.

We have these kinds of moments all the time. Things are going fine, and then they’re not, because you think of something you might have to deal with. The moment goes a bit dark. You wish you hadn’t thought of it. Another thing on your plate.Problems emerge like that: a mental tapping on the shoulder, and a darkening of the emotions. I’ve become really interested in the exact moment this reaction happens, and watching what physical feelings creep in. It almost always does something to the body: the jaw hardens, the skin flushes, or a pit grows below the ribcage.

In those moments, it can be easy to forget (assuming you realize this in the first place) that most of these apparent problems will never have to be solved. They’ll never ripen into real-life dilemmas that require anything difficult from you. Chances are they’ll be sticky notes in the bin at the end of the week if you are organized enough to write them down.

Over and over and over in my life, things that I think will be a big problem turn out not to be. Something else happens instead. Or, a moment I’m dreading comes and goes and it’s not that bad. Most of the time, the only difficulty posed by a problem is dealing with the moment in which it occurs to you that you might have a problem. After watching thousands of my worries go straight to the bin, I’m getting better at noticing the “shoulder tap” when it happens, and reminding myself that this problem probably isn’t a problem. Most problems never become real-life dilemmas for a very simple reason. Our minds work many times faster than real life does. In a single minute, your thoughts can jump between a dozen or more concerns:The car is making a weird noise. I think,there was something I was supposed to buy — what was it,Oh crap, I have that thing tomorrow, and I hate mingling,I have no idea if I’m saving enough. Probably not.

Real life only shows up one moment at a time. One thing on your plate.Your mind tells you there is a problem whenever it detects a somewhat possible unpleasant future experience, which it can do all day, and it happily will if you don’t call its bluff. Of course there’s an infinite supply of potential disasters. These are just thoughts, but they seem like realities, and any one of them can create an emotional pitfall now no matter what actually happens later.Each of these apparent problems represents itself as something you will have to act on at some point. Ninety per cent of the time, this is a lie. Thoughts are like little politicians; experts at rhetoric, sensationalism self-preservation, unlimited in number, mostly just noisy and useless but occasionally make important things happen.We probably have ten or twenty or fifty apparent problems for every real problem, and that can make a normal day into a minefield if you react to every one as it comes up. The tendency is to want to engage with it right there, as if we can make it go away this way.

 And what is our solution to all this dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the ' If only' syndrome. If only I had more money, then I would be happy. If only I could find somebody who really loves me, if only I could lose 20 kilo grams, if only I owned  a car , and curly hair, and on and on forever. So where does all this junk come from and more important, what can we do about it? It comes from?