If someone were to ask you “how is it going right now?” and you were completely honest, what would you say? Would you be able to feel in your heart that things are going good or even great? Do you find it hard to be happy with your life as it is showing up right now?
Life is so hard and stressful for nearly all of us. Pressures from work and family, marital or couples relationship issues, economic stresses, and other life issues just bombard us and at times feel like they’re crushing us. How many times a week (or even a day) do you feel like shutting out the world and just taking a prolonged or even indefinite break? So many of us do – regularly.
Many of us have heard the phrase, “come what may and love it!” However, this is really hard to do when we feel life crashing down around us or firing on us. So, what do we do instead?
As a therapist and life coach with over 30 years of experience of helping people, I found that there are ways people commonly cope with things that may actually be harming them in the long run.
In my practice, I see that many cope through what I call distraction. So many people cope with their difficult lives by filling up their days, keeping busy and going places. We keep busy working at home, out of the home, volunteer at church or in the community, etc. We may play sports and exercise in our off time, play music, do dance or art classes, binge on movies, TV, and of course, social media.
Oftentimes we feel like we’re doing OK because we’re too busy to think deeply about our issues or our feelings about them. However, as Uncle Remus was quoted to say, “You can’t run away from your problems – there ain’t any place that far.” So, while distraction techniques help to a point, sooner or later, when you’re not busy, the feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, self-doubt, or discouragement still flood in our hearts and minds.
Another way many cope is through getting lost in fantasy. We have a world where we can engage in nearly any type of experience virtually as we want. We have computer games, books, movies, social media outlets, creating videos, and so on. In social media, we have the ability to represent our life any way we want, often keeping hidden troubles and heartaches, all in an effort to show “followers” a charmed life that everyone is jealous about.
Many of us also create dreams in our minds of how life could be better and we long for that type of reality to actually happen for us. These dreams seem like a pleasant escape, but we often unwittingly also create expectations alongside our dreams. Expectations always have a level of “need to,” “should,” or “have to” attached to them. So,when we face unmet expectations, we almost always experience frustration, discouragement, shame or guilt (if our expectations are about us) or resentment (if they’re about someone else – like spouse/partner, kids etc.).
The problem with these outlets is that they are all artificial escapes that create fantasies in our minds of a happy, successful, or carefree life that we long for but can’t seem to create in reality. This creates tension and more heartache.
What is the missing link? What is the key to being happy and joyful now? For me, it’s as simple as learning how to live in our current life and accepting what is showing up for your life right now.
There’s a funny trend I notice every December where people are so happy to swear off the ending year and hope for a better year starting in January. However, is it the year that was the problem, or our attitude and perception about the year? What would happen if we embraced both the good and bad of every year and saw good in all of it? What would happen if you love each season, each stage of life, each week from start to finish at a deeper level? What would happen if you trained yourself to really mean “I’m doing great” when people ask you how you’re doing rather than just pretending you are?
The key is reclaiming or attaining the lost art of living in the now. Living each day at its fullest and loving what comes, even if we have ideas, dreams, or desires for things to be better. Keep your hopes for the better and do things to create those better outcomes as you can. However, we will never be happy with the future if we can’t or don’t know how to be happy with now.
Now is all you have. The past is gone, and the future hasn’t happened yet. Every moment you are aware of is the NOW. So, happiness and fulfillment in life is really about becoming friends with “now,” and just like any friend, it has both its charms and challenges. But like you do with any good friend, you embrace all of those goods and bads and choose to still be friends. So, make friends with your life as it is right now (and everyone and everything in it) and see what happens. It could be a real game-changer for you.
