Why life is the way it is
- Vijaya Vulapalli
- May 6, 2020
- 2 min read
We are taught, way to be happy, joyful and positive is by always being successful, efficient and capable - from cradle to grave. It is just burdening yourself with expectations that are directly against nature of things. It is like tying a donkey’s weight on your back and driving yourself uphill in hot summer. In fact, your life has nothing to do with any of these. Life is an exciting exploration or a means for constant personal evolution.
We experience life through our emotions. Our precious moments, our beautiful experiences and painful memories are all loaded with emotions. Just reflect for a minute, can you remember any significant event without associated emotions?
Given that, it is amazing we were never taught anything about our emotions at our homes or schools. We were given a lot of training on how to use our thinking. Rationality, IQ, being smart, using your mind were seen as best tools you absolutely required to develop in order to navigate life. But nothing was ever said about how to understand your emotions or what’s their purpose in your life.
Although emotions are cornerstone of your life experience, they are entirely left out of your toolkit. You were even taught to treat emotions as hindrances for ‘useful thinking’. No training, no role models, no information - this itself is a handicap. On top of all that, some of the training is geared towards how to ‘keep your feelings aside on job’ or ‘cope with negative feelings’.
Unfortunately that means labelling a half of all your feelings, or emotions as negative and expecting yourself to find the means to feel only the other part in each moment of your life. Right now, your life is all about feeling positive, joyful or happy. It is a constant haggling with the ‘negative’ part of you - say, to control anger, to manage fears, to cope with jealousy. This is negating at least half of who you truly are and what your authentic experience is.
Plus, a major part of your precious time goes in just figuring out how to combat that situation which caused your ‘negative feeling’. And how to make yourself feel ‘positive’. It is an incessant battle with aspects of your life that cause your ‘negative’ emotions, so that you can start feeling ‘positive’. For example, I like the job but my manager is a bitch, I wish she is transferred or I get a new job. That takes away any time and energy you have to change the situation so that you can change how you feel. It is much simpler just to handle your emotion and feel happy now irrespective of situation outside of you.
No one is good at handling their emotions by birth - it takes practice. Just like it took you a lot of practice right from childhood to think for yourself, to put your thinking to use to your best advantage. Some people are good at connecting with their emotions but they just had more opportunities to learn and practice, they had better role models. Most of us are clueless. We don’t even know we are missing anything here. We just keep searching for reasons why life is the way it is.