Cheer Up, Charlie - 5/12/2011
Ostensibly, I have a few genuine reasons to be depressed. There are a lot of things in my life that I feel could bring me down if I gave them much thought. If I chose to dwell on how unfortunate I am in some regards.....I would no doubt be in a constant state of despair.
Only I'm not. There's simply too much beauty in this world to focus on the negative aspects of it for any great deal of time. Certainly, an understanding of the enormity of suffering going on in the world is essential for compassion and integral for promoting change throughout the world. But when your vision becomes myopic, when you devote your time and energy into thinking only about your own suffering and your own problems, then you lose sight of what's truly important. And that's not that EVERYONE is sad, depressed, lonely and filled with pain...but that everyone has the capacity for experiencing life the way it's meant to be lived.
Joy, curiosity, love, passion, exuberance.....these are incredible emotions that are constantly being felt throughout the world every second of every day. Furthermore, there are things so exciting going on right now that if we had even the faintest notion of their existence, we would feel ashamed for all the times we proclaimed our boredom. And that's just within our society, at this moment. Imagine within the universe, in star systems far far away. In galaxies strange and exotic, events are happening beyond our comprehension that are so mind-numbingly enormous, so vastly, unimaginably AWESOME, that if we could but glimpse these phenomenon our perspectives would instantaneously shift, and we would never have cause to complain about one iota of our existence ever again.
I guess I just never understood depression. It's affected many of the closest people in my life, causing their personality to change almost fundamentally, which in turn affects my relationship to and with them. It's such a shame; such a debilitating disease. A complete waste of resources, of the joy one could be having...thanks to factors like genetics and chemicals in ones body that you have no control over. I don't subscribe to the notion that depression can be easily dismissed by "changing your mind", or just "getting over it"....because it is a chemical process which affects the way you process and receive information, and thus relate to the world. However, I truly don't believe medication is the answer (as it never is), and would readily promote meditation and exercise as a means for overcoming, or at least managing, ones depression. But that's not what this post is about. This isn't my diatribe on clinical depression, rather...it's an attempt to convince those of us who feel like we COULD be mere seconds away from sadness to, instead.....think differently. We're almost always thinking, so instead of thinking about anything that harms us or drags us down, THINK AGAIN! Remember what it's like to have FUN, and know that millions of people are having fun ~right this second~, and that you can experience that too if you choose, regardless of where you are or what you're doing.
Because in the end, you're always making a decision. You're always choosing between joy and suffering. And knowing this, why would you ever choose to be anything other than happy?
