The Choice to Live: The Well Is Deep within You

The Choice to Live

You'll still find many people living a slow suicide, the kind of thing like deliberately choosing to die. Such are the people who hardly create joy for themselves, they seem to harbor within them a distaste for almost everything they do. We all have that part of darkness within us and we spread it around us also, listless moments where we may go for hours losing touch with our inner selves; like actors on a stage we strive to make a pleasant face before others, straining to hide our fears, our pain, our deceptions. Many people are not happy, and most of the people you think are successful aren't happy. And most of the unhappiness we feel everywhere we go is what we carry within us.

When you were younger than you are now, you had dreams, petty dreams, big dreams that set you unto life's gory paths, that set you through unbeaten tracks... You might have dreamed of taking the "less untraveled road" that makes the difference. After many years of searching, you got what your heart desired, your dream job... and a great love-filled-life, and family and cars and lots, a whole lot of cash lodged in your bank account. Yet.... yet, you still feel so afraid, so terribly afraid you are always losing something.

Sometimes I have wondered, as you yourself might have wondered, in your night of uncertainty, if life couldn't just be easy: something like it could be easy to rise, easy to work, easy to have fun, easy to just get what you want. Yes, life could be that way, and I bet you, it would be such a moron kinda life. So much of our sadness springs from the fact that we have - consciously or unconsciously- refused or neglected to let the throb of life surge up from within us, we have laid down blockages and barriers across the channels where love could flow in and out of our humaneness. One great enemy of happiness is to feel that your happiness could come from someone else, or something, or some place. That is a big lie. You create it, you let it out by growing more and more to humanity: that is what you are. It starts with the feeling that you are unique, that you are just you - flawed, weak, yet beautiful. It is the feeling that is contrary to self-pity, the feeling that sees the grace of life just every where around you.

Your job, your-dream-come-true exhilarating experience, your friends and loved ones are just spices that season the sweetness of the joy you are called to carry around. It is a gift that is akin to our being human and it flows out with the corresponding sense of inner freedom. If your happiness would depend on others you will become a slave of a whole scheme and system that will condition your attitude and restrain your potentials. You can't just do what you want to do that makes you happy because the people -- the source of your happiness-- may get in the way, the sense of creativity is hampered and love becomes conditioned.

Live like you depended on no one, love like there never will be any other instance, embrace your freedom of the child of light, pursue your dreams without being afraid to fail... for, even if you fail, you have the experience of the road that makes things different. Treasure your solitude, embrace your pain, generate your happiness but never forget that you are a part of humanity.

For my short but intense span on this wan earth, I have known one certain truth: the more you are in touch with your deepest feelings, the more you will open up to humanity. The more you walk the path of compassion -- I mean the heart of human -- the more you discover the springs of life waiting to water the deserts of your life. Believe in yourself. Believe in the light within you. Someday, that hidden light will be the only sign for others to discover sense and meaning.