By Bernice Alhassan.
It always looks better, the other side; the grass on the other side. Not just the grass, but your best friend’s wife, the neighbour’s sports car, your boss’s apartment, your colleague’s job and more. A lot of times we find ourselves not being entirely content with what we have. We spend so much time lamenting over what we don’t have and how the person next door lives better. What we don’t realize is that often times our lives are already filled with so many wonderful things but we fail to appreciate them. Unfortunately, it usually takes losing or nearly losing what we have in order for us to realize how much it means to us and how happy we were with what we had.
The mind is a creator of illusions and rarely learns from the past. Most of what we have now, we once dreamed about, fantasized about, wanted, and went after … but now that we have it, we are no longer as interested, and so our minds create the illusion that if we just have something else, then we will be satisfied. Sadly enough this hardly ever happens. We seem to take so much for granted without realizing that it takes a lot of emotional stability to be satisfied with what you have and to be able to resist the temptation of thinking that other people have it better. To be able to say “No thanks, I’m married” when that perfect woman comes along who gives you butterflies in your stomach and makes your world swirl. Funny enough, it’s not just humans who have this issue. Even cows do it all the time. They have a big field full of green grass, yet they always venture to the end of their field and stick their heads across the fence just to be able to get a bite of that forbidden grass on the other side (that may just look so much tastier).
The deception with seeing things that you think will make you happy is the fact that initially, you only see the rosy side of those things, unfortunately. Once you have them, everything becomes clear and you begin to experience the awful side as well and this may leave you thinking that it was better when it was just a dream.
The key to a happy life is being truly satisfied with who you are and where you are right now. Life is an awesome journey. That doesn’t mean you should put up with a mediocre life or one you are not happy with. You can and should aspire and work hard to get to where you want to be, to achieve your goals and dreams. But don’t despise your current state for some future happiness that you think you will achieve by copying someone else’s lifestyle. That is the surest way to waking up one day when you are 40 years old and realizing you spent your life chasing happiness, while you had the means to be happy all along.
A possible way out is to begin to practice wanting what you have. Instead of looking at your life and seeing what you don’t have, which is a certain recipe for unhappiness, boredom, discontent and envy, look at your life and see the gifts that are yours; cultivate gratitude for those gifts.
Everyone always wishes for something they don’t have. Maybe you admire someone and want to be like them in certain ways or you wish for someone else’s life because you think yours sucks. Truth is, you may not have an easy life, but it is your life. You are not in control of the cards you were dealt when you were born (your parents, your city, your country, your skin colour, your state and so on). What you are in control of is what you do with those cards that you were dealt. Your life afterward is what you make of it. If things are tough and you play the victim, grumbling and complaining about how tough you have it, then chances are that your life will not improve and you will live a very dissatisfactory one, at best.
An enlightened person wants what he or she has, and the illusion that things are better “over there” rarely even comes up. So next time you think someone has it better than you, just stop and think about how others may think you have it better than them. The grass on your side may just be greener.
