Tag: reflection

Perspective is the new happiness

A prompt. I’m always looking for one, hoping to stumble upon something that will get my ass moving in a particular direction. A prompt to do something, make a move, think a certain way. I could call it inspiration, but that word itself is daunting and often is seen as aloof when the lack of inspiration is what is causing the distraught disposition. So, a prompt is something more obtainable, less threatening.

Give me a word, I’ll expand on that.

Give me a feeling, I can expand on that too.

Maybe through a prompt, I can find, feel really, the inspiration that I want.

I want something to prompt my writing, I want something to prompt my motivation to workout, to eat healthily, to find a new mindset, essentially, to be happy. Because I’m finding happiness comes and it goes. It’s something I have to be mindful about. Because when I find myself not doing so hot, or letting my emotions get the best of me, I realize that I let my happiness run away from me. And that’s ok, sometimes I need to feel things other than happy to get a real grasp on my reality in order to live in a perspective that shows me what’s real, where I need to go, and how I should handle certain things. Because even though I can try to constantly be happy, life has its own agenda that sometimes does not match mine. When that happens, I realize happiness is not what I need to hold onto, but rather perspective. Just like happiness, perspective changes—it comes and goes and has different forms. It is what shows me new happiness, it helps me feel different, good. Good or bad, it definitely presents both, and in that perspective, I can realize that happiness doesn’t have to be stable. Realizing that happiness shifts makes the downs and the emotional rollercoasters easier to handle. Easier to navigate around.

I’m hard on myself, I know this. I constantly feel like I should be doing more, which boosts up my stress levels and I find anxiety is the only hand I’m holding.

I talk a lot of talk, preach a lot of preach, and struggle daily trying to hold myself up to my words. I find myself in a catch-22 often, or at least I feel that way.

Perspective. That’s one word that I really do think makes the entire difference. It’s what makes things important. It’s what makes things make sense. It directs happiness and shows you where you place your joy. In search of the perspective that I need, I often find myself aware of the lack of such a view and find myself grasping onto what I believe is true without realizing the possibility of an alternate reality. This is where we find ourselves getting taken out at the kneecaps, where our breath gets beat out of us, and we feel like we’re in a well with walls 1000 feet high. We get stuck in something that seems perpetual and we take it as so. Our ignorance keeps us from seeing past the walls that we put up. Our misery keeps us there, whispering sweet nothings into our ears until we feel that where we are is where we belong. It’s not until a passerby comes along to get some water that we realize there was a bucket and rope hanging right above us, we just had to look up.

See through

It’s what you feel when you aren’t doing anything. You feel parts of yourself that you forgot were there. It’s in the moment that you feel the wind blowing your flyaway hairs, you hear a quiet that is louder than the world around you. The world where people are yelling, cars are honking, and machines are machining. You realize that quiet is the thing you have been running from, or hiding from. Because once quiet finds you, you find yourself consumed in its loudness. You see the dust floating in the air in the beams of the sun. You hear those thoughts in your head that haven’t had the chance to come forward with all the other noise going on up there. You scare yourself in that way. Seeing something that has always been there, right in front of you, shows you that you are more ignorant, more distracted than you prefer.

It’s a necessary thing that is more underrated, forgotten, neglected, and relied on least when it comes to self-care. Thinking that the noise of life, the sounds of people, of music, of traffic, of nature, of games, of movies, of cooking, of conversation is more substantial to our growth than what quiet, what slowness, what reflecting on what has happened to us, is the kind of thinking that causes us to stay in an unnoticeable rut. We become ignorant to things in life because we actively portray our lives through the noise, the happenings, that we go through.

But when the happenings are over and we find ourselves naked we find ourselves in a place that meets us with either familiarity or hostility with a pushback that we filter with drugs, alcohol, and Netflix. We neglect ourselves of the quiet that we need, that others around us need us to have. We lie to ourselves, or more we don’t get to know ourselves. The time we are offered to familiarize ourselves with the why’s, the how’s, and the hmm’s become a mind-numbing buzz that becomes detrimental to the foundation we stand on.

The quiet can be where you find out what is important to you. It’s where you realize what you want. It’s where you see what you don’t want to deal with anymore. It’s where you see through the bullshit of the world that you surround yourself with. Or, it’s where let your mind wander. You may find nothing in the quiet, and that’s part of the deal. 

The thing about this quiet though, it’s not only part of the auditory sense of the definition, but really all the senses. It’s the stillness you find around you. It’s the taste that you find on your tongue. It’s what you see beyond the bullshit.

It’s what you notice.

Taking time to notice things is more rare than I think most are aware of. So easily we are distracted by the touchscreens we have so close to our fingertips. So quick we are to jump into a conversation just to be a part of it. It’s hard to stand back because, shit, what if somebody notices?

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