Happiness and Simplicity

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Louie Clearheart of The Love That I Am

Many of us have heard the saying, “live simply, simply live.” This is a key to happiness. It is when we make things too complex, or entertain too much drama in our lives (or more frequently our thoughts), that pain comes, suffering comes, and unhappiness comes.

Surprisingly, many of us are addicted to drama. We identify with it: all of the thoughts around excuses, reasons, judgments and justifications, or the endless “what if…?” scenarios we may play in our minds. Without all that, “who would we be?” we think.

Actually, a better question is, “what would we be?”

And the answer?

Happy.

Life is like Spaghetti

I love spaghetti, but it can be a complicated process to make it. It’s similar to life in that way.

1. There are multiple ingredients, and these ingredients must be balanced in order for the best taste.

Like making spaghetti, life is all about making the ingredients work with one another and to achieve balance. If your life is too heavy on work, you’ll burn out. You need a social life, a sense of meaning in your daily life, perhaps some sort of spirituality, etc. You need your emotional and mental well being in order for your life to be balanced and for you to be a whole person. To top it off, without your physical health, you aren’t going to be around long enough to be able to enjoy the life you’ve created for yourself. Missing out one ingredient can mess up the whole recipe, fouling the taste of the finished dish. Seek to create a balance between your life’s ingredients, recognizing your own deficiencies and taking small sensible steps to remedy the situation.

2. Timing is essential, if you overcook or undercook anything, it ruins the whole dish

Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want them to when we want them to. Life is just like that. If we force things too much, we risk making ourselves and others unhappy just as burned garlic will ruin your sauce. And let’s face it – what is spaghetti without a good sauce? Learning to let things flow until the time is right is absolutely essential. Just like watching all of the ingredients cooking is essential, so is knowing what is going on around us in our lives. If you ignore an issue expecting it to take care of itself, you may very well end up regretting it. This also ties in with our ingredients. If we’re always rushing around worrying about what comes next, maybe we forget to do things necessary to our balance. If you don’t add salt and oil to the water, the spaghetti ends up bland and sticking together, does it not?Intelligently applied action is the key here. It should require minimal effort because you’re neither trying to push things through early or shove them in too late. This is similar to the Taoist concept of wu wei, with its emphasis on effortless, struggle-free action. Like water you should flow, perhaps in this case the water which boils the spaghetti. Just keep one eye on all of your cooking pots and the other on your current task, moving forward one step at a time.

3. In the end, it’s all in the eating.

Once the dish is cooked and on your plate, it ceases to be about the trouble you’ve gone through to get there. If our minds are full of the nonsense of action, worry and business, how can we truly enjoy our spaghetti? This is the same in the case of our lives. What is the use of working so hard if we can’t enjoy the things we’ve earned? What is the point of providing for a family we never see? Again this goes back to balance. When you’re at home, be at home. When you’re at work, be at work. Each moment is a single piece of perfection, ephemeral and there for the seizing. Be there to experience rather than shut away in your own head. When you take a bite of spaghetti, make sure you taste it.

The power of two

People talk a lot about the power of one person to create change. This is definitely true in many situations, but the real power of one is in the inspiration of the many. What I’d like to talk about today is the power of two in changing one life. Well, strike that and make it a possible two lives. Let me explain.

When one person sets out to do something difficult, that person often falls quite early, failing his or her challenges and not achieving the goals he/she set out to achieve. For example, if I were to decide to get in shape on my own as I have many times, chances are I’d fail because I’d just be following the same pattern I always have and eventually I’d be tempted to give up, eat wrong, be lazy, etc. The power of two is the person with whom you choose to partner to achieve your goals. In fitness, this is quite common, I’d say. People often have gym partners, running partners, etc. My partner in running is now my wife, Steph. When one of us doesn’t really feel like going for a run, the other person can Steph in and exert a little positive pressure where it is needed. For me, this is very important because I find that I can get pretty lazy and it really helps to have someone else in the same situation, going through the same things and trying to achieve the same goals. It means I’m not alone and that if I fail myself, I’m also failing someone else. It adds that little bit of guilt to quitting which I don’t want to experience so I simply don’t.

So we know that two people can work well together to achieve fitness, but what about working together in other ways? People work in teams in their careers or jobs, they work together in marriages and as parents, and they often work together on projects which they enjoy. One example I have in my personal life is the HandRooster webcomic. My skills are primarily in writing and thinking up ideas, not drawing. When we started HandRooster Steph did the drawing (once in a while she’d write a comic as well) and I did the writing and it worked for a while but she really had a much greater workload than I did. Because of that, she ended up giving up on it and I had to go it alone. This was difficult for me because as I said, my skills are in writing and thinking, not drawing. I tried my best to come up with different ways of doing things. It worked to some extent but I could never quite do the excellent job she did. Her skills in drawing are better and it just wasn’t natural for me. She saw me struggling with the comic the other day and ended up volunteering to work on it again. We’ve done a few now and we’re doing them in a way which I hope is more sustainable for her. She draws them on paper and I scan them in, clean them up, do any coloring which needs to be done and then I write my post and upload the comic. I think this is a more balanced approach and I hope it works in the long run. It just goes to show you that if you communicate as a team of two and divide your efforts and work things out, you can achieve results which just aren’t possible as a single person with a single set of skills. Simple, but true.

Caring equals productive

One thing that people don’t often mention when they’re speaking about productivity is that productivity relies a lot upon someone actually caring about the project on which they’re working. It’s quite obvious when you think about it. People will be better at, try harder at and spend more time doing things which they want to do when compared to tasks they don’t want to do. I think that’s very clear and I doubt anyone would argue against that fact. The problem with this whole concept is that in our daily lives many of us have to do things which we don’t particularly find enjoyable or want to do. There are a couple ways of dealing with this problem.

The first way is to find a way to care about your work. Find things you enjoy about it, take pride in your expertise and your effort and claim ownership of the project. Make it your own and as something that is inseparable from you, it will start to matter more and more to you as a person. This is essentially what I’ve done when dealing with IT. When I did IT in the military, I didn’t particularly find the environment or the job itself very appealing, but I found ways to care about my work. I cared about my reputation and about how people viewed my projects. I cared about the protection, maintenance and development of my assets. I made everything my own and I cared what happened with it. I worked to make myself indispensable and respected and although I didn’t see my ultimate future in IT or the military, there were things about it that I did enjoy. I think I was more productive than most people an I don’t know many people who cared about their work more than I did. This approach can earn you trust, friendship and respect even if you aren’t keen on staying in the field.

The second way to deal with the problem is to stop doing work which doesn’t excite you. This is easier said than done, as most people these days tend to specialize in one field and it is often difficult to find employment in a new field without further education or experience. In 2007, I decided to get out of the military. I wanted to pursue freelance writing. I didn’t have a degree and I wasn’t going to work for anyone. I moved with my wife to rural Scotland and I ended up having to do some IT work to get by. While I have done a few paid writing jobs and I am working on some projects on my own, this didn’t end up being what I had hoped it would be. I don’t really consider myself a failure in this respect. At least I can say I tried. I took a risk and lived a life and challenged myself. Some of it was bad timing, some of it was inexperience and a lack of understanding about how to proceed. I still want to be a writer, and I intend to pursue that goal for the rest of my life, unless something inside of me changes. My methods of attaining this goal may change occasionally, but in my head the end is still the same.

So what I’m saying by this in my own simple way is that you shouldn’t live a half life just getting by, doing what is required but nothing more. You should live to produce and create, whatever method you choose. Whether you choose to learn to care about what you already do or choose to pursue something you already care about and learn what you need to know, do either one with all of your available energy. Either path will bring you good things.

The Tao of Unemployment

It’s no secret that I’m looking for employment at the moment, and I’d be lying if I said that the process hasn’t gotten to me occasionally. It can be extremely difficult to deal with the constant rejection and indifference from potential employers. For months I’ve been looking for and applying to jobs via every conceivable method available to me. The thing is that for all of the hundreds of jobs I’ve tried to get, the times when I’ve been closest to employment have been the times when I’ve done the least amount of work and not tried to fight the situation.

What I mean by this is that on these occasions, I let my personal and/or professional network work for me. A friend, family member or colleague would recommend me to someone, citing my particular skill set and experience and all I’d have to do is answer a few questions. I can’t say whether or not these situations have been successful or not only because they are still ongoing, but I have hope that at least one of these opportunities will work out and that I’ll find a position which fits me.

I find that when I don’t try to force things, I am more relaxed and therefore perform better when faced with a legitimate employment opportunity. This being said, obviously trying to get a job is something which requires a certain amount of effort. The important thing to remember is that when doing this, the best and most productive way is to spread the news about your job search is through your existing network. Even if you end up only hearing about an opportunity through a friend of a friend of a friend, you may still end up with information about a position to which the general public is not privy. This can often bring up strange opportunities which may not have occurred to you otherwise, but you shouldn’t dismiss them.

It is really worth considering unemployment itself as an opportunity rather than a curse. It can give you a chance to think about your priorities and consider different directions to pursue in your career, to build a network of contacts or to work on improving skills and knowledge. It has given me the chance to consider my long term goals, assess my career path and think about where I want to end up, both professionally and geographically. It may not be the most stable point of your life but it can be just what you need at just the right time in order to rejuvenate your life and prevent career stagnation. So, to recap -

Don’t fight your situation
Let your skills, experience, and network work for you
Don’t force things or dismiss unique opportunities
See unemployment as an opportunity for growth