28 Sep Happiness is a world that’s not flat!
From this morning’s eNewsletter…
The other day I went for quite a long walk with my son, who has plenty of energy and so for whom distance is rarely an issue. But this particular day it was warm, and we were going far, and we were travelling up quite an incline for much of the way.
My son likes a chat so most of the way he was telling me one of his amazing stories but at one point he stopped, paused, and expressed his wish that the world was flat so that walking wouldn’t be so hard. When I asked him about enjoying downhill runs he reflected for a few minutes and then agreed that it would be best of the world was flat AND downhill.
I then suggested to him that it would be hard to have a flat and downhill world, without any uphill bits, because you need the uphills to have the downhills. After thinking about this for a minute he changed the subject and started telling another one of his stories…
I should note that my son is only 7 and so for most people reading this, “grown ups” that is, the idea of having downhills without uphills would seem obviously absurd. But how many of us wish we could only have the good times without the bad? How many of us want to enjoy happiness without sadness? How realistic is it to expect rainbows without the rain?
Happiness is a wonderful positive emotion and certainly one I encourage everyone to strive to experience as often as possible; but we need to be realistic about things also. As much as we might like happiness all the time it’s not going to happen; to enjoy happiness we’ll sometimes need to experience pain; to enjoy happiness we’ll sometimes need to endure hardship; to enjoy happiness we’ll sometimes need to learn from failure.
The world’s not flat…let’s try to enjoy all the ups and the downs!
PS: if you don’t currently receive our free eNewsletter feel free to sign up – just click here