This month’s blog is inspired by the discussion topic for
the next WOW! (Women of the World) meeting on
22 April.
We are daily bombarded with misery, chaos, disaster, war,
fear, tragedy, etc. – both natural and
man-made, and we often ask ourselves if it is right to “allow” ourselves to
feel happy in the midst of others’ anguish.
When we are laughing and enjoying life, we may feel a twinge of “guilt” when faced with the circumstances in
which others are “living” We may ask
ourselves if we “deserve” to be happy, or we may comment that someone else “deserves”
(or not) to be happy.
When did happiness have to be earned, “deserved”? When did happiness become conditional on
other people being happy too? When did
feeling happy cause harm to anyone else?
Indeed, we may extend that question to when did personally feeling happy,
or personally feeling unhappy, make any difference to the lives of the victims
of tragedy?
Well, on that last point I’ll say that it did and does make
a difference – it makes a difference on the energetic level. Happiness is a high vibration of energy that
attracts more of the same – it feeds the energy that creates the circumstances
to support happiness. Unhappiness works
in the same way at a lower level of vibration – it feeds the energy that
creates the circumstances to support Unhappiness!
That is why it’s not only your choice to feel happy, it’s your
responsibility
to cultivate happiness in yourself! How YOU feel is reflected in the energy web
that connects us all and shapes our reality!
The big question, however, is “What is Happiness?” What does happiness mean to you, and what
does happiness mean to others? Each one
of us has an individual definition of happiness, and within each one of us is
the ability to experience happiness regardless of circumstances.
So I’ll end with an extract from “One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich” that perfectly demonstrates the “happiness choice”...
“In the novel ‘One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn takes the reader on a guided tour through life in a
forced-labour prison in Siberia. The
novel tells of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s day, which is filled with tales of
bare survival and the almost incomprehensible atrocities visited upon the men
in the frozen wasteland camp. Shukhov’s
attitude displays creative aliveness even under the worst of conditions. The book concludes with these lines:
‘Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they
hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent his squad to the settlement; he’d
swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well;
he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade
through; he’d earned a favour from Tsezar that evening; he’d bought that
tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d
got a happy day. There were three
thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last
clang of the rail. Three thousand six
hundred and fifty-three days. The three
extra days were for leap years.’”
Something
to think about......
