With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
November 10, 2009 - 9:26 a.m.
I just stopped by FHDC and saw that it was Gella's birthday. Now I knew that and wished her a happy birthday but this was the first time I didn't sign her Frühead card. I feel bad about that.
So what am I to write about today? I haven't left my apartment since my last entry. Let's see what's on the back burner.
It's a common belief and it can be terribly destructive. It would be nice if it were true but that doesn't make it true. If you're suffering clinical depression or things are bad enough you can't simply choose to be happy. The belief can in fact exacerbate unhappiness. It makes unhappy people feel guilty, like it's their fault they are unhappy. It lessons compassion as other people think unhappy people are simply being self destructive. It makes unhappy people feel like failures.
Of course there is an element of truth in it. It is in fact one of my repeated themes. I know from my own experience that there are times that I choose to be unhappy. I don't think of it that way but it's what it amounts to. I find myself wallowing in my problems. I think about everything that is wrong in my life. More destructively I start imagining the way other people will hurt me in the future. It's feeling pain for things that haven't happened. When I catch myself doing that I stop myself. It might not make me immediately happy but it makes happiness a possibility. It keeps the sadness contained. Yes sometimes I have to slog through the pain till I emerge on the other side but I know I will emerge. I won't if I keep turning around and heading towards its center.
Now thinking the same thing happens for other people is a leap of faith but not a huge one. Despite what some people say I'm not a total freak. I am human with human reactions. The details differ but I can see we all work similarly. I see other people turning towards the pain all the time I wish there was a way I could tell them to turn around. I do tell them but it usually doesn't do any good.
Now we probably all do it to some degree but I'm wagering that you know some people that do it far more often than others. Can they learn to do otherwise? That's a good question. I have and I'm happier. I'm not always happy, not by a long shot, but I seem to be avoiding the prolonged dark thoughts. Perhaps other people can't even choose to choose to be happy.
I think the real lesson is that you can't fit the secret to life on a bumper sticker. There are always exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions and exceptions to the … .
Ives-y League - November 15, 2009
Gangs of Horvendile - November 14, 2009
Does God Believe That I Exist? - November 13, 2009
Captain Obvious - November 12, 2009
More Choices - November 11, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 10, 2009
