What do you want from life?
We all have certain basic survival needs – air, water, food, shelter, and safety. Most of us have these basics met. If you don’t then the focus of your life will pretty much be on securing these needs or else you won’t survive. But aside from these needs most everything else we might want from life is just that – wants. We have a tendency to label many of our wants as needs and pretend that we can not be ok without those wants, but this is just a game we use with those around us and with ourselves to justify our demand for the things we want.
So what do you want from life?
Most people want to feel comfortable. Some people actually want to feel happy. Toward this end people will create lists a mile long of all the material objects they think will provide them comfort or even happiness. The right cars, the right house in the right neighborhood, the right clothes, and even the right smart phone – all carry the illusion of comfort and happiness. Accumulating the right stuff is a major driving motivation for many people.
Other people are focused on the right relationships for comfort and happiness. They are not driven by crass materialism, but instead know that the good life is all about having the right kind of relationships. Their time and energy are spent on finding and creating the perfect mate and friends. Their lists of the qualities these mates and friends must have to be “right” seems to get longer every year. They are forever judging the inappropriate behaviors of others and see it as their mission to correct the faults of others – all for their own good of course.
Still other people are driven by the quest for social justice and equality. They believe that heaven on earth can be achieved with enough legislation forcing people to act humanely and with civil equality. Punishing offenders that dare to put themselves first and protesting the life destroying antics of multinational corporations fills their every waking moment. If we could just make everyone behave right, then happiness would be achieved.
The list goes on and on as to what various people want from life. The one common theme most everyone in all these groups have is that they all believe that their comfort and happiness can be achieved by getting some thing or circumstance from outside themselves to make them happy.
I will cut to the chase with this perspective – You can not fill your insides, gain the feelings you want, with something from the outside. Feelings are completely an inside job. The mental excitements called emotions can be stimulated by outside things and events, but inner feeling states are about you, not the outside world. Feeling happy is about how you feel about you in relation to the outside world, not about the outside world itself. Happy is about you to you, you in relationship to loved ones, you in relationship to everyone else in the world, and you in relationship to the bigger picture (God, Spirit, The Universe, Nature, etc…).
Does this mean we should take the ascetic path and deny the outside world so we can spend our days in quiet meditation on our own inner self? Surely this is the most direct route to happiness. There is a complete denial of comfort so this won’t work for most people. In my view this also seems to miss the bigger point of being alive. It fails to empower the unfoldment of a person’s creative capacity. It also avoids the formation of human interconnectedness. These two goals for me define the essential purpose of human existence.
Instead I would like to offer a very simple perspective shift. Instead of approaching life from the perspective of an empty bowl looking to get filled up, look to life as the
playground in which you get to learn to express the fullness already inside you. I would suggest that what we really want is the skills and the opportunity to express who we are in the world. I would suggest that this is where true happiness lies.
The motivational shift I have started using for myself is to start my morning by asking myself “How do I want to express my joy today?” This simple shift in focus of attention takes me out of the false belief that I am somehow empty and needing something outside myself to fix me, and moves me into the abundance inside myself. It both makes me a creator and a connector. It fulfills my basic purpose for existence – creation and connection. I choose to be purposely joyful, not because I have something to be joyful about, but because I am a source of joy just by expressing me.
I don’t want to imply that this is an easy path, just that the basic starting point is very simple. There is a lifetime of learning associated with this path. I have to learn how to express effectively and in a respectful manner. I have to learn lots of good communication skills, good boundaries, how to let go and move forward, and so on. But the key is flowing from the inside out instead of living an unhappy life seeing my self as always in lack and forever seeking the something that will fill my emptiness. This outside-in living is never really happy so folks spend much of their time trying to separate from the uncomfortable feelings by using substances and behaviors to block the awareness of the bad feelings. By comparison, living inside out starts with fulfillment and then builds more and more fulfillment with skill development at expressing that inner abundance.
“How do I want to express my joy today?” “How would I like to share the fullness inside myself with the world?” “What new skills can I learn today to make me better at doing this?” “What fears do I need to overcome?” “What new interests can I explore?”
This is a life in which you are focused on outflowing to the world instead of being constantly hungry and unhappy, drugged and seeking momentary bits of excitement to cover up the inner feelings of emptiness.
You don’t need to be anybody different than just who you are right this minute. All you need is already inside you. It is just a simple perspective shift that will turn your source of motivation completely around.
How do you want to express your joy today?
Give it a try…