We are sick of all the negativity in the mainstream news and which people pick up and share on their social media accounts. We want to raise our voices and demand highlighting positive and happy news in this country. We know that there is so much love to share. We will not share any negative news in the coming week. Who is in?
A week of good news
In “The winner stands alone” – Paulo Coelho‘s latest novel – there is a list of *normal* things that people do or believe in.
I have picked 10 from the list, some that I had break off, and others that I am working on:
1. Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure at all just so, after thirty years, you can retire.
It is actually from eight to six for me! Long working hours – I know. That is something that I still need to do, but I won’t wait till my retirement. I will for sure find other doors that would change this (already working on it).
2. Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying few years later of sheer boredom.
I CAN’T let this happen, and I won’t! To be honest, I feel less energy now being in my thirties than being in my twenties or teenage. Maybe it is due to hectic long working hours, or maybe it is age. I am afraid that it is true that their won’t be enough energy for me when I retire, but who said that I need energy to enjoy life? ;). That is the beauty of being a lazy man – you never die of sheer boredom 😛
3. Believing that power is much important than money and that money is much important than happiness.
I see it everywhere, but I have never adopt it. Happiness always comes first for me. I know that pursuing money have ate from my happiness in the past year or so, but that is something I felt needed for more happiness in the future. I may be wrong, I will try to balance, and keep a smile.
4. Making fun of anyone who seeks happiness rather than money and accusing them of ‘lacking ambition’.
5. Waking up each morning to an hysterical alarm clock in the bedside table.
Akhhhh! You know what, the day I stop waking up to my phone alarm would be the day where I would declare that I have wonderful mornings.
6. Believing absolutely anything that appears in print.
I am a person who prefers to give trust rather than doubt, but I also have the ability to smell when something is fishy and when it is not. Unfortunately, I know many people who don’t just believe anything in print, but also they believe everything that hit their email inbox! (especially those related to religious myths)
7. Eating three time a day even if you are not hungry.
I eat 6 times a day and I don’t mind more! This is one of the beautiful things that people do.
8. Assuming the women don’t like football and that men aren’t interested in home decoration and cooking.
Strict gender roles! I have broken mine and do enjoy what ever make me happy. Cooking and home decoration do sound really more fun than watching football!
9. Blaming the government for all the bad things that happen.
People who do that really annoy me! I believe firmly in the saying: It is better to light a candle than to curse the dark.
10. Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonyms with having a ‘powerful personality’.
I feel sorry for people who believe in this and actually build their personality on it thinking that they do really have a powerful one where in reality it is just a stupid thing to do because deep inside they know that aggression and rudeness is just a form of protecting their fragile inner-self
Sometimes, in special moments, when I am in euphoric state of mind, I feel that I am so happy and that happiness can be a constant state of mind that can be carried along one’s entire life. Sometime, I wonder if being happy is a learning process where one, and with life experience, realizes what makes him happy and what eats from his happines, and as a result work on minimizing the effects of thing that makes him unhappy, and exposes himself more to things that make him happy.
Is it as simple as this? To know what to choose? Sometimes I believe that it is, but at other times, I let myself slip into the daily hectic activities of life, and end up losing focus and forgetting about the necessity of smart choices to keep up my level of happiness intact. I let stress in, I let my busy schedule tire me, and I let myself scatter my attention in different matters that are irrelevant.
I am the kind of person whose goal in life is to be happy and feel it spread among people around me. And yes, it is most imporant to me that many other things. Things that I keep on letting them messing up my priorities and focus.
Throughout my life, I have always managed to define myself as a happy man. I always knew that the question of: Are you have in your life? has a Yes answer to me. In the other hand, I have always wondered why some people around couldn’t give the same answer. Is it a gift? a biological inherited advantage? or a wisdom that I have acquired since childhood? or maybe it is just a choice, or maybe a projection of internal fears force me to believe that I am happy?
Is happiness a wise choice? a learning process? a genetic inherited attribute? a destined faith? or a piece of all of it?
I have finally finished reading “Memoir of Geisha”. While I can’t say that it is not a good read, I can’t say that it got me hooked either. In fact, I struggled at the beginning to keep myself interested in the book because of some strong reviews of friends, and later it took me ages to finish. Nevertheless, the whole setting of the life and culture of Geisha is very rich in the book. It is worth the read!
Anyway, I put “Memoir of Geisha” aside and picked up ‘The Kite Runner” for Khaled Al Husseni. I wanted to read this book for a very long time now. I never managed to buy it, but then got it as a gift last month from a very sweet friend. The book instantly got me hooked! Not just for the style of writing, but also for the amount of information in it, the cultural aspect and the engaging story.
In the very few first chapters, I got touched with this short story written by the main character in the novel. It talks about a poor happy man with a cup that can translate tears into pearls. Since the poor man is happy in his life, he never tears, and thus never managed to get those pearls. He, then, started upsetting himself in order to get those pearls. The more upset he is, the more pearls he got. With time, he became a greedy person, and ended up sitting on a pile of pearls weeping with his slated wife’s body in his arms!
The story hit me hard as I have been facing some stress recently trying to engage myself in different projects in order to be able to gain more money. I think that it had ate from my happiness which is something that I shouldn’t compromise. I know that many people have fall into such pit and lost their happiness in the process. The answer of bringing money may not be of doing more work that eats of your happiness, it can very well be by coming up with a creative smart way to do so. The man in the story could have easily shed tears by using onions instead of going down the lane of making himself unhappy!
Fadi Zaghmout فادي زغموت 