BEING TRUE TO YOURSELF

MISS CALIFORNIA 2009

I clicked the following link this morning:

http://omg.yahoo.com/news/perez-hilton-the-way-miss-california-answered-her-question-lost-her-the-crown/21528?nc

and proceeded through the Perez Hilton's celebrity blog, for no other reason than that I was bored. Perez asked the Miss California contestant whether she agreed with same sex marriages, to which she fumbled a reply, but stated that she actually disagreed with it; she mentioned that those were hers and her family's values. Good on her, I say. Not that I agree with her (because, actually, I don't...), but she was honest and didn't fake a response.

For me, that is refreshing, especially in light of what most beauty pageant girls see as the 'proper' response, i.e. anything that will get them more votes!

Perez said that he thinks this lost her the crown. I say: Who cares?

:-)

EXPECTATION vs. REALITY: expect the unexpected

One of the roots of much of our suffering is expectation. When we expect something and it doesn’t happen, we feel dejected and unhappy. The greater the expectation, the greater the unhappiness when it doesn’t work.

Yesterday, I monitored myself with a view to understanding how the expectations vs. reality scenario works during an average day. To my surprise, this little battle rages almost constantly under the surface. But this time I was ready: I expected the unexpected, so my mood remained unchanged. Here is a short list of the things which didn’t work out as expected:

The coffee had run out at home, so I had to have a hot chocolate;

We had to go the market instead of my favorite, snazzy supermarket with imported delights – so I had to miss out on some little luxuries;

We had to leave the market early because my son felt unwell, so I went without almost everything!

I couldn’t chat with a friend on Skype because he had a family emergency;

My American Idol recording (I recorded it the other night - we all have our little weaknesses…) didn’t work properly, so my wife and I had to stop watching it.

Now, of course, none of these things is particularly major, but they could all potentially affect someone’s mood, depending on how stable that person is. But there are often much more serious results from the conflict between expectation and reality.

For example, love in relationships. Is a daughter more loving towards a mother than the mother is towards her? Is a husband more loving of his wife? Have you done something for someone that you consider substantial and worthy of significant praise or reward but it doesn’t come? Have you apologized to someone and expected an apology in return? Have you made an investment and expected a return, only to find that the risk you took hasn’t worked out? Et cetera, et cetera.

So, how to conquer this all too familiar problem? Well, simple: lower expectations, and expect that sometimes things won’t work out as you had hoped, because that’s the way it goes sometimes!

BEING A SOMEBODY

Most of us want to progress in our lives. We seek more money, promotions, higher status etc. But at what cost? Often, what we aspire to become is something which we finally want to reject before returning to a life closer to that which we left behind in our struggle to ‘be someone’, to be happy.

IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION



The fact is that we are all someone. And often the happiest of us are ‘nobodys’. Isn’t it unrestrained freedom that we all seek in order to live happy lives? Freedom to say as we wish, do as we please and live our lives privately in the manner we choose with as little stress as possible? If so, then why do so many of us feel pressured into extending ourselves into new and more stressful dimensions of our lives, such as higher positions in work/society with more responsibility - when it seems to, in many cases, make us more unhappy? The answer is social conditioning. Social conditioning (the ways in which modern society gives us 'role models' in celebrities, and convinces us that we need more money to be able to lead a happy life) which generates the drive in some of us to be ‘better’ than we are; but, again, at what cost? Notable world leaders in various fields can be heard discussing their lives after retirement; tending their gardens, paining watercolor scenes in the countryside nearby their homes, or simple pleasures such as fishing and having family barbecues are all things that we hear them say – and these are the simple pleasures. Why, then, did they spend so much time climbing to the top, only to seek refuge in retirement where they can be ‘relaxed and happy’? Why not be relaxed and happy right now?
The confusion arises because many of us do not correctly identify what we need to be happy - happiness for many of us is an illusion, often a fleeting one because of this misidentification...


TO BE OR NOT TO BE - DO WE ASK THE QUESTION?



Being a someone almost always brings added pressures, what with having to live your life in the spotlight, constantly under public scrutiny. It appears that many superstars these days are very badly off in a spiritual/mental, and all too often physical sense. Which brings me to my point: what is the point? A ‘somebody’ can be reduced to a ‘nobody’ in the flash of a camera, with devastating consequences for their mental and physical health. The sense of ‘I’, “me’ and ‘mine’ are shattered and broken; often the higher they have climbed, the harder they fall. At least, when you are a nobody, you haven’t ascended the socially conditioned ladder, so don’t need to worry about falling.

Lastly, a nobody is already a somebody. We are all somebody – It’s just that some of are confused about exactly who that somebody is.