Finding Yourself

 

Kay uman kun ako da isa, pirme baja dapat hamok para malingaw? There are those who are comfortable with themselves. There are also those who cannot stand their own persons that they have to escape. They need others to lift themselves up since they do not know how to do it themselves.

In the ’80s, the Italian journalist and author Tiziano Terzani, after many years of reporting across Asia, holed himself up in a cabin in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. “For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli,” he wrote in his travelogue A Fortune Teller Told Me. Terzani passed the time with books, observing nature, “listening to the winds in the trees, watching butterflies, enjoying silence.” For the first time in a long while he felt free from the incessant anxieties of daily life: “At last I had time to have time.”

Some people can go for a walk or listen to music and feel that they are deeply in touch with themselves. Others cannot.

It is alarming to note that there are people who depend their happiness to other people, situation, events and alarmingly to things. They will then become sad, frustrated or even depressed when these will be out of their grasp. This is what we call as relative happiness. There are even those who confuse enjoyment to happiness.

The peace and quiet others often seek allows then to sit and really think about things. And this is something they actually love doing. They like to find answers to those deep and meaningful questions about life and the universe. They like thinking.

Others may see them boring but these people are NOT bored at all. They read, listen to music and write down ideas. They can then be good resource persons for they have a tank full of ideas and theories. They may look boring but their thoughts are filled with a myriad of ideas that lighten up their minds!

Absolute happiness describes a kind of happiness or sustained joy that you find within yourself. It doesn’t rely on people, places, things, or goals — and so it is stable through the flux of life. Unlike relative happiness, it doesn’t fade due to circumstances, and it makes both your life and the lives of others richer. It’s absolute happiness that we should be chasing, and actually, that’s the great thing about it: we don’t have to chase it at all (Sturm, 2019).

Stop depending your happiness to people, things and situations. Find it inside you. In the end, there will be no one there but you!