three principles for a deep life
How do we take control of life when it feels as if we’re a cosmic punching bag? The principles of radical responsibility, happiness as a state of mind, and viewing your day as a mirror for your life can help us feel empowered and live the life we truly want to live.
I operate under three basic assumptions:
You’re responsible for everything
Happiness is a state of mind
The shape of your day determines the shape of your life
Let’s begin with the one most likely to be misunderstood: Radical responsibility.
you’re responsible for everything.
There’s a common misconception that being responsible for something means we’re at fault.
We’re not.
We’re not at fault for someone driving and almost hitting us while we’re crossing the road, for our card declining at the grocery store due to technical error, or for the abuse we suffered in our childhood.
But we’re responsible for it, meaning what we choose to do in response is in our hands.
Yes, this is unfair. But what are we going to do about it?
Are you going to throw yourself down in the middle of the road to cry about it? Insist that the cashier let you leave without paying, since it’s not “your fault”? Spend the rest of your life inflicting abuse on yourself, doubling your own suffering, because the deck was stacked against you in the beginning?
Of course not. Instead, you select a path of action that ensures the least damage to yourself.
This is a basic Stoic principle: For every single thing outside your control, there is a corresponding area that is in your control.
That means you’re going to get off the road lest you actually get hit. You’re going to pay in cash, call someone to help you out, or leave. You’re going to realize that while you weren’t able to control what happened to you, you can control how you show up for yourself now.
This is a lesson it took me a while to learn.
When unfair things happened, I wanted the people at fault to take responsibility. Why should I pick up the mess they created? But that’s life: If someone comes to your apartment, dumps the contents of their trashcan on your floor and leaves, what do you do? Chase after them and insist they come to clean it up?
Maybe.
But if they refuse? Are you going to live your life with that trash on the ground, letting it decay, stink, grow mold, infest your floor?
Why am I painting this graphic image? Because that’s what we’re doing with our mind and soul when we allow other people’s abuse to determine whether we’re happy or not.
I’m not saying is that we should “just suck it up”, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or repress our emotions about what happened or is happening to us. Addressing and processing our anger, our grief, and disappointment is vital in order to truly heal. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t get stuck there forever.
The truth is that what has happened can never be undone. The past is gone. By constantly repeating without processing our emotions about our trauma, we recreate it in our present. Living a good life doesn’t come from erasing our life up until this point. It comes from choosing how to frame it.
This leads me to the second basic principle.
happiness is a state of mind.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian-Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist. He was also a Holocaust survivor. In three years, he spent time in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Frankl survived, but his parents, his brother, and his wife were murdered.
In 1946, he published Man’s Search for Meaning (originally titled A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp), detailing his imprisonment.
Frankl focuses not just on what was done to him, a feat that already takes enormous strength, less than a year after the end of the war. He focuses on what he attributes as a major contributing factor to his survival: The profound realization that, whatever outside circumstances are forced onto you, the one thing that can never be taken from you is control over your state of mind.
Please sit what the enormous implications of this knowledge.
If Frankl, a victim of one of the worst crimes against humanity, could find this power and strength within himself, who are the rest of us to refuse?
This is not meant to shame or to blame. Yes, we suffer too. But likely, if you’re reading this, you do not have to fear for your survival.
Happiness is a very elusive concept, if only because I believe that it is truly in the eye of the beholder. What is pure happiness to me might be utter hell to you. So this is a task of self-reflection for you:
What does happiness mean to you?
Is it an early-morning walk in the park with your dog, the way your hands, frozen from the crisp air, warm up as you clasp them around your cup of tea after your return? A quiet afternoon curled up in bed with your favorite book? A loud party, your best friend’s arms around you as you belt out your favorite song in unison?
All of the above?
Take note that all I mentioned were “mundane” moments. So common that if we don’t pay attention, they might pass us by unnoticed.
None of them involve a perfect happily-ever-after. You can be having stomach cramps throughout, or someone can empty their cup (or a bird their bowels) on you. Yet, this doesn’t have to impact your happiness if you decide that it doesn’t.
It’s easy to feel happy and appreciative when life is going well. When it isn’t, when it feels most difficult, that’s when it’s most vital. Frankl writes of a morning march towards a forced labor worksite:
My mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look.
[…] Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Viktor E. Frankl. Man’s Search For Meaning, p.37-38. Beacon Press.
Find power in this knowledge: You have more control than you think.
Which brings me to the third principle.
the shape of your day determines the shape of your life.
As I implied earlier, happiness is found in the now.
Not in a perfect childhood, you can never go back in time to create. Not in a perfect future free of problems or obstacles.
Right now, when you are where you are.
Which is fortunate because how you spend your day is how you spend your life.
The people you spend time with, the amount of time you spend self-reflecting, scrolling through comments sections, arguing, practicing gratitude—they reflect the present you live in and the future you’re creating.
Notice that one word that came up twice: Time. It seems to be getting scarcer the older we grow, seldom spent intentionally, mostly wasted. The one thing we can’t control.
Or can we?
If Frankl can find mental pockets of bliss in the midst of a concentration camp, we can find pockets of time spent intentionally in our days.
Yes, there are outside factors of our control, many of them. Maybe we don’t control our working hours or when they take place. But how do we spend our breaks? Instead of scrolling through twitter and getting emotionally involved in the latest celebrity drama (yes, even if that emotion is “amusement”), we can take time for deep breathing. A quick walk. Eating lunch, mindfully.
The reason we feel that we don’t have time is because we’re throwing most of it away. A coworker says something mean-spirited, and we obsess over it for the entirety of our shift. By the time we get home we’re annoyed, drained, and we numb our senses with binge-watching a show we’re only half-interested in, still cursing our coworker. This is the time-equivalent of having someone steal your pocket money and, in retaliation, throwing your entire wallet after them.
Instead, we could use our break to journal on what the coworker said, work through our surface emotions. Maybe we’re still agitated, still wish them ill, but by the time we’re at home, we’re less focused on them. We take a calming shower, read, call a friend—we spend our time on us instead of them.
David Bach suggests that if we were to “pay themselves first”, meaning take a certain amount out of our paycheck to invest in our future, many of us could become millionaires. I propose we apply the same principle to the time we invest.
If we’re mindful of investing in us, we ensure that our life is shaped according to our wants, not other people’s demands. So how should we invest in us? By doing more of the things that make us happy now.
Instead of wasting our days on people and activities we don’t care about, we can decide to spend them studying the things we’re interested in, spending it with people who nourish us and getting to know ourselves better.
By taking responsibility of our lives, we can choose happiness despite our circumstances. By practicing happiness in the present, we ensure that it flourishes in the future.
Love,
Jenya x
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