My secret to happiness lies in the balance of the
good and bad things in my life. I write to demonstrate some of the wondrous
things that we experience with Maggie. It is a positive view of a life filled
with joy and love. Obviously there are
very difficult things that happen everyday and, while I don’t want to dwell on
them, I write about those too. The
challenges Maggie faces and how we handle those is the interesting part of our
lives. While they do not define us, the challenges certainly shape us. Neither
the joy nor the problems are interesting on their own. It is finding the joy in
the mist of those difficulties that makes our life interesting.
We find our balance, but it is not easy. We walk
a tight rope every single day. There is no net, but we are high up on that rope
inching forward all the time. We get to the other side, turn around and come
back again. We are not doing it to impress anyone; it is not for show. It is
just our life. Most people don’t even
know we are up there because they are busy with their own lives on the ground
where maintaining balance is a little easier.
We can stay on that tightrope only with the
balance. It is a delicate matter of
finding joy in the dark, of grabbing those couple of great minutes after hours
of dealing with a problem. Perhaps I can appreciate those wonderful few minutes
only because of the hard hours that preceded them. The lows are low and the highs are high, we
need both to maintain balance. I do not
expect anyone to completely understand that, but I certainly appreciate it when
people respect it, which almost everyone does.
Yesterday I encountered someone whose philosophy
does not acknowledge the tightrope or the balance. She “teaches happiness” and says we can all
be happy by simply deciding to be and if we all made that decision problems
would disappear, there would be no sadness in the world and the roads would be
paved with lollipops. That is simply not
true. I make the best of my situation every single day. I have a positive
attitude and consider myself a very happy person, but I cannot make Maggie’s
problems go away. That makes me sad and the sadness is valid. It is not that I am happy DESPITE the sadness,
I think I am happy in part BECAUSE OF the sadness. I am proud of that. I was deeply offended by her simplistic
outlook, which ignored the proudest parts of our lives and the hard work we do.
She knew I
was not buying in to her philosophy and wanted to know why. As I tried to
express my concerns and frustrations my voice cracked. That surprised me. It hit me much harder than
I realized. I knew then I was going to lose it and I just got out of there. I’m
generally the first one to stand and fight, but It was “fight or flight” and I
flew.
It’s back
to the tightrope for me. There is a possibility that a person who leaves a
"Happiness Class" in tears may be slightly out of balance. Or maybe I
was providing the balance. Who knows?
I would
take a bow, but I might fall over.
