The Bumpy Road to Happiness

The Preface:

I wrote the below blog post over a month ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to publish it because I felt like it would make me a hypocrite. Soon after writing it, I had a tough few weeks, and “being on the road to happiness” sure felt like a load of shit. But, I’ve decided to post it with this preface anyway—because, like most of the posts on this blog, my hope is that the way I’ve learned to experience and handle my own struggles may provide a helpful blueprint for others.

So, I’ve written many times in this blog about the importance of being with the present, of accepting what is. I try hard to implement this in my own life, but sometimes it can be difficult. I’ve already detailed how tough last year was for me, describing some of the challenges and ultimately landing on a note of positive forward momentum. That general trajectory has continued, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t found new areas to bring me down along the way. 

I’ve not had a formal job for over four months now. In a vacuum, I’d be ok with this, as I know I need time to deal with the traumas of the past two years, time to reorient myself with my new life of being single, moving to a new state where I don’t know almost anyone, selling a house, changing careers, recovering from drug addiction, etc. But, we don’t live in a vacuum now do we. And I have allowed conversations with family and friends who inquire about my lack of a job—mostly innocently, but sometimes not so much—to bother me. A lot. 

That’s because, despite not working a job, I’ve been working my ass off in other ways. I still do not feel like I’ve taken any kind of meaningful break, which is what I actually need in order to figure things out. But thanks to social conditioning, all my mind can think of is that each day that goes by where I don’t have a job, I am less worthy of existing (despite having been employed for 95% of my adult life). It doesn’t help that I have various people who are (or were) close to me poking the bear, constantly asking why I haven’t got a job yet, aren’t you looking for a job yet, don’t you know you need a job, you really should find a job. 

Thankfully, this past week I finally got to talk to my therapist after a six-month hiatus. Now look, I am very open in this blog, but I don’t share everything. No one in my life knows everything I’m dealing with, except for my therapist. The self-flagellation and feelings of self-loathing over not having a job is a big struggle for me, but it is one of many. So to be able to sit there and openly talk through the things that I’ve been working on, to have someone listen to it all and put a hand on my shoulder and say Jon, you’ve been going through a lot, and it’s been hard for you, and it would be hard for anyone, and you’re doing really well moving your life forward despite all those challenges…I can’t tell you how helpful that was to hear. It’s like taking off the straight jacket and stepping outside of the white rubber room and heaving a big fucking sigh of relief. Phew. Ok. I’m not insane for feeling stressed about all this. I’m doing well, all things considered. 

Side note: Let this be yet another one of my endorsements of therapy. If you’re not seeing someone, and feel like you’re struggling, put in the time to find a therapist (preferably one with some knowledge of mindfulness). You can probably find one for cheaper than you think if you self-pay using Family Health Services or similar. It can make a huge difference just to have someone to talk to about everything.

Simply talking to her about what’s been going on in my life, even if she didn’t have all the answers, was tremendously helpful to me. It felt like a few of the heavier weights on my shoulders were lifted immediately after the conversation, and my dread was replaced with stability about where things are at today. It was like, yes, if I could be open about everything with others, they would understand why I’m not rushing back to work. But they don’t know everything. And they have their own struggles, struggles that they probably stack against the ones of mine that they know about, and I can’t control that. I don’t need to care so much about what they think.

While I don’t need to care about what others think of me, I do need to care about what they have to say about themselves. The other thing I wanted to discuss in this preface is the value I’ve found in joining a new sangha, Refuge Recovery. Basically this is AA/NA using Buddhist teachings as a framework. Attending these meetings have made me realize that I’m not in this shit alone. Plenty of us are in the shit. In fact, most of us are in the shit, in one way or another. Knowing this doesn’t solve things, but it sure does make a difference. It is so easy to get lost in the toxic cyclone of despair when you are sitting at home by yourself (especially if you are more of an introvert, happen to be in a new area and don’t know almost anyone, and aren’t currently regularly engaging with work colleagues); hearing others open up about their struggles, you realize that we really are all in this together. We might see X and Y’s shiny exterior on social media, but we’ve all got our own challenges. 

So, after realizing that it’s ok that I’ve been feeling the weight of my challenges lately, and realizing that we’re all dealing with our own respective messes, I’ve decided to post this blog, despite my struggle to fully live the message I’m sending. I’m doing this so you, dear reader, might see this blog post as more than an empty shell of words, devoid of the suffering that burdens you in the real world. I suffer, you suffer, we all suffer. There will be joyful times and there will be challenging times. I’m not going to pretend I’m able to “mindfulness-it-all-away” because the truth is that life is hard and sometimes we all get caught. I am grateful to say that I’ve had a few good days this week, that my therapist conversation helped nudge me out of a rut, and that today I woke up genuinely happy to be alive with a body and mind that function as well as they do, able to hear the birds singing, see the vitality of the trees and plants as they rise in the spring, taste the delicious berries in my oatmeal. Today I’m ready to go, I’m getting things done, I’m feeling productive. Tomorrow might be another bump in the road, it might not be. But the words I’ve written in the following post hold true throughout our journeys. I hope you find them useful. 

The Actual Blog Post:

I’ve partially written three books and abandoned each of them for various reasons. One of them involves a story written from a first-person POV that riffs off of my real life experience, and since I’ve been considering writing a mid-life memoir-style book about life lessons, I recently revisited some of what I’d previously composed. It was fascinating to review my perspective from over a decade ago as I reflected on my own struggles to be happy at that time. Below I share an unedited excerpt from one of these writings, because I think it does a good job of conveying the inner struggle that many of us go through in our quest to be happy, to be free of suffering. 

Honestly, reading my old writing made me pine for the journals I kept in my youth, unfortunately all burned to ashes during my declining days of teenage angst. Let this be a lesson to those considering purging your past writings—you may regret your decision.

Now I know that you the reader have no context for the below excerpt, but the only thing I really need to mention for the purpose of this blog post is that the tone of this book was somber, extremely cynical, and one of quiet resignation. As you’ll see, I’ve been examining my mental tendencies for a long time now; back then I hadn’t discovered mindfulness and I didn’t have many wise voices in my life, so I had become despondent about the prospects of future life. So, the writing is bleak, but since I’ve come to appreciate that my perspective at the time was probably not that unique, I am sharing it as an example of where I came from before I arrived at where I am today. Now, I see clearly that mindfulness and Buddhism provide instructions for living a more skillful life, for reducing our suffering, for abandoning despair, and for cultivating happiness. These things are all within our reach, if we can break our cycles of reactivity and conditioning and instead live in the present moment.

Without further ado, here’s the excerpt from one of my books:

Damn. I remember writing it, and I really meant that last sentence, truly. 

What’s so fascinating to me is that even back then, I pegged many of the problems that continue to persist in my life today. I knew that my thoughts were causing me great suffering, the “torture” I inflicted upon myself, but at the time I didn’t know how to deal with them, other than to numb the pain with drugs and alcohol. 

I’m not sure why we always have to say “and alcohol” in the context of drugs. Alcohol *is* a drug. But I guess it’s important to delineate that, since people might assume otherwise. I digress.

Back in my twenties, I was already constantly questioning my decisions and life’s purpose. A long journey ensued and consisted of me bouncing from one band-aid to the next, never finding contentment, only just enough space from suffering to get me through the day. I almost started clawing my way out; I had dabbled with meditation in college, even using my research methods study project to investigate the effects of daily meditation on subjective well-being (shocker: subjective well-being improved!). But, not knowing anyone else even remotely interested in the subject, it eventually got deprioritized and fell by the wayside, as often happens. Reflecting on this experience reminds me of the importance of finding a community to support skillful behaviors (like meditation); in Buddhism we refer to this as taking refuge in the sangha. 

Being in a community could have helped me see just how many other people were having similar experiences to my own. I would have discovered healthier coping mechanisms, and simply by virtue of being around others who were acting more in-tune with their bodies and environment, I would have become more mindful of what set off my negative thought spirals, my existential crises. I would have learned that we can be happy now, without reason, if we learn to accept where we are today while cultivating and nourishing positive habits.

Easier said than done, certainly. But we *must* make an effort to do so. Failing in this regard means a lifetime of feeling unfulfilled, of feeling like something is missing, of feeling regret, of feeling resentment toward “x object or x people or x group” for preventing our happiness. 

—

I listened to a few episodes of a podcast called KickStarts recently. Sylvia Flannigan is a life coach and licensed therapist who I saw for marital counseling (don’t be discouraged because it ended in divorce, which was ultimately the right decision), and she offers bite-sized nuggets of wisdom in her podcasts. In the first episode, she discusses the value of setting up keystone habits, essentially positive habits that we engage in regularly that move us toward our personal goals. She gives an example of this in her own life: She wakes up at 5, reads for a bit, does a gratitude journal, and then cooks a good breakfast while listening to a podcast. In that way, she’s able to net five keystone habits bundled into a routine that starts her day off in a way congruent with her life goals: Early rising, reading, journaling, cooking, and listening to something positive.

If you find yourself in the despair spiral written by a younger me, then you might find it valuable to apply this concept to your own life. By doing so, you’ll organically start moving toward the person you want to be, which will conveniently facilitate the journey to being happy with things as they are. I say “organically” because this shift will happen without a concerted effort; each day you won’t be saying “I am doing x to make me happy,” but rather attaining some satisfaction and happiness innately through your choices that day. Now there *will* be work and discipline involved, yes. You cannot get around that, so stop trying to think of shortcuts. Changing our perception of the world and ourselves takes time and *lot* of effort, especially for those of us with certain brain chemistry and life circumstances. But the payoff is worth it. And the best part is that the more you engage in these positive life-affirming behaviors, the more they’ll seem like an extension of who you are, and gradually over time feel more natural. There will be less resistance and tightness to the concept of change.

Arnold Schwartzeneggar has some great advice for developing new routines: Show up. Show up, everyday, and over time you’ll make the progress you wish to see. It doesn’t matter what happened the day before. It doesn’t matter if you don’t set personal records. You show up today, you make progress. He talks about how sometimes he’d come to the gym and feel like a million dollars, but other days he’d come and he couldn’t lift for shit, he had no endurance, and his body ached horribly. Yes, some of this is controlled by our physical/mental conditioning and what food we ate, but he pointed out that he could feel great the day after eating several pies the night before, or feel awful after eating and exercising just right the day before. His point is that we’re not always going to feel up to it, but that’s life; show up and put in the work and you’ll be happy you did. 

For the most part I feel this is great advice. I do advise listening to your body, and if you need rest, then rest! But often, our fatigue or discomfort or worry is temporary, just a set of thoughts that happen to churn through our brain mill as a means to getting out of whatever challenge lies before us. So if you’re sitting there and wondering how to be happy, start taking steps to build positive keystone habits. Put in the work, show up every day. You’ll stumble, and that_is_fine [update: see the preface for the post]. In fact if you’re not stumbling, then you might not be pushing yourself to grow enough. The important part is that we get back up and keep showing up. The results will come.

So when you consider what is holding you back from being happy, take a close look at your daily life and see how much of what you do is actually congruent with the person you want to be. The more we can make those two match, the more that happiness will follow. And as you encounter struggles along the way, even those can be viewed with curiosity and dispassion. The world is moving toward fairness and equality and equity (due to many people’s wonderful efforts), but it is far from all of those things; some people are presented with more challenges than others. But none of that matters with regard to your daily choices because that’s the way things are, today; it’s the reality of the present moment. We can and should work toward a better society, but we need to work toward a happier life for ourselves regardless of circumstances.

Life ain’t easy and lunch ain’t free, but we make our own sandwiches. If you don’t like PB&J, throw out the damn jars.