Living for Ourselves by Giving of Ourselves... Love and Trust

If you can love, you should. If you feel you can trust, you should. Life is never about it being easy. Those who have it easy can never have enough because they're never truly fulfilled. I would wager anyone with obscene amounts of money rarely fully trust anyone. I'm sure there are exceptions. No group can be boxed up into nice, neat categories. Every thing on this planet has its outliers, its rebels.

I don't want to focus on those who feel their life is a breeze or whom we believe have such lives. I think only sociopaths are without worry, but I'm sure there are still things that give them anxiety. Instead I want to focus on everyone else. There is a commonality between us all, a few actually. Struggle is one. Change is another. We all experience both. I believe our lives could be so much better if we share in those experiences, letting others know what worked for us and what didn't. Giving that knowledge freely, if possible. We could all be very motivational in that regard.

The reason I say love if you can, I mean if you have a chance, then do it. Allow yourself to trust. So many times we do either or both and it does not go as we hoped. It feels like we are crushed and our hearts break from the betrayal. Sometimes, the outcome is a mutual understanding and our lives go one with or without a new friendship, but usually a lot less painful. It happens. It will continue to happen. We will experience let downs. We must experience them.

You are going to die. There is no doubt of this. When you do, many will be heartbroken. That is life letting us down. It is also life going about what it does. We don't control it. We are part of it. The only thing we control is how we interact within it. We can cut ourselves off in an effort to avoid pain and heartbreak. We can fling ourselves at every possibility of love and friendship and give our trust to all we meet, then experience overwhelming loss and sorrow. I'm suggesting we do more of the latter, but not so much that we do so without care to ourselves. We can avoid much of the pain by recognizing patterns.

I am making no claim to know the secret for a happy life. There are sections of libraries and book stores on that subject. They all share similar concepts if you break them down. I'm not sharing anything new, either. All I offer is an observation and a suggestion. Live your life expecting great things, but understanding not everything will go your way.

I used to say I hoped for the best, but expected the worst. I have come to realize that "philosophy" failed me. I was miserable all the time. I put on a happy face. I found substances and behaviors to provide periods of contentment that I chose to believe were happiness. I found that I got burned a lot. I approached most people with distrust. I waited for them to let me down. I expected them to. I would say I was hoping they wouldn't, but I wasn't. I made a decision to change and expect the best, but prepare for the worst. It worked for others. It would work for me. It didn't.

What has worked for me when it comes to pursuing my best life, is hoping for the best outcome, planning how to achieve it, and expecting it to come to fruition. I don't consider failing. I have days of doubt. This has been a relatively new approach for me, but I have learned about mindfulness and used it to ground myself in the moment because the worry, the expectations of everything going to crap, had a far more negative impact on my life than dealing with the negatives when the arise. It has been better, for me, to focus on the positive and expect positive results then adjust my actions and thoughts accordingly should I get negative results. Spending less time expecting them made it easier for me to cope if they happened and seemed to produce more positive results because that was what I expected.

I stated I'm not offering anything new. This is an old concept that many have written about. I learned this behavior and I'm still learning it. It's very much based on the Law of Attraction. There are several books on the subject, but the one most of you are likely familiar with is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Oversimplifying the concept would be... the more positivity you express and put out into the Universe, the more the Universe will return to you. The more specific you focus yourself, the better chance you will achieve your best life. It is a way to change how you approach life.

I included those last few paragraphs to help me reinforce a point. Over time, we should recognize the behaviors of those who are not to be trusted. This doesn't insulate us from trusting someone who may eventually betray that trust. It does not mean to allow ourselves to be mistreated because we want to be positive and loving. We can use what we learn to reduce the chances of being hurt, nothing more. What we should not do is stop trusting. We cannot stop loving. Life is not meant to be lived without risk. I do not think staying positive means to ignore the risk. It means to view the possible positive outcome, be aware of the negative possibilities, and decide if the risk is worth focusing and expecting only the positive outcome. We are going to fail. Everyone fails. What matters is that we learn from the failure and never let ourselves believe that is all there is to expect. If we never trust, how are we living? If we never love, how will we allow ourselves to be loved? It isn't worth living in fear. It isn't worth letting others decide if we are worthy of success or not. We are.

I don't see this as mystical answer to life's problems. I don't claim trying to live a life of positivity is going to be an easy path to take. There are days I don't want to see another living person. I get up and go outside and do just that. Every time I have done so, something uplifting has happened. Also, every time I have experienced something negative that sadness me or I see something that breaks my heart or makes me angry. All of that is valid. It is almost always out of my control. If there is a chance to change it and I recognize that I can do so, then I try to change it. If I see it is something I cannot change, I accept that this is a part of life and find something positive to counter it with. Try to decide to live a loving life, a positive life. I once scoffed at such ideas. Now I don't believe I have ever had a happier time in my near 50 years on this rock.