My friend,
I may not know 100% how much of a hard time you’re having right now but as a fellow human being I know what it’s like to suffer and I feel for you. In these times it’s so much easier to be hopeless and pessimistic. It seems like hope requires effort, and for what? For more days filled with gloom and depressing reality?
So I am with you when you’re feeling down, I see all the reasons why you’d feel that way from your perspective and I too wish things were different for you. But what I also hold is hope. What is that hope about? Hope that your situation will improve? Hope that the world will be a warmer place for all? What I hope about is your ability to be happy today in this moment.
You might know that I grew up in Korea. Things look different now but when I was growing up education was very… Gnarly. We got beat a lot by teachers, we beat each other up a lot, there were a bunch of oppressive rules, and there were unreliable enforcers of those oppressive rules.
Our hairs couldn’t be longer than 2cm. If they were, the teacher would come with a razor and just shave our heads off. We were hit for not doing our homework, we were hit for making errors on our homework, we were collectively punished if the entire class’s grades weren’t good. There simply was no way to win in this.
A teacher might have a bad day and just have a field day with beating us. Some of them were really adept in their beating skills, they devised their own tools of disciplines (more like weapons) and methods of torturing us (having us kneel and lift our desks with our hands, hit us behind the thighs, or the good old slap us till we bleed).
In this environment it feels like every day is a mandatory torture chamber. They don’t let us do anything in general, and we’re only allowed to do things with permission. They may not allow us to grow our hair. Not wear our uniform. Sing in class. Slouch at our desk. Skip cleaning the toilets. They can do their best to control us but there is one domain that they cannot control: our mind.
They can’t force us to be miserable. If I am happy there, there is nothing they can do about it. Hair they can forcibly cut. Uniform they can put on me. They can hit my neck until I can’t make a sound anymore. Then can put straps on my chair to fix my posture. They can put scrubs on my hand and shove it down the toilet. But they can’t touch my will. They can’t touch my ability to be hopeful and happy.
Nobody can force you to be miserable. This also means you don’t need anybody’s permission to be happy. But we forget this with life, we keep thinking that we need certain set of circumstances and certain set of approvals and validations to be happy when NONE of that is a requirement for happiness. The only permission you need to be happy is permission from YOU.
You’re going through a time that defies your definitions of what a normal life is. You can’t imagine how this experience can be beneficial for you. But as you know, I wake up at 5AM and start my day with 108 bows and meditation. At first 108 bows are very very hard, but one time I did 1080 bows and after that 108 bows hardly feels like a challenge.
You’re actively increasing your capacity to be happy. This period of time is your training era. We get complacent when our life is going somewhat the way we want, we don’t actively train the mind muscles of happiness. A great gym has a lot of heavy equipment and exercises that are super difficult, a sucky gym has a treadmill and some dumbbells. Seen in this way you have a free membership to a great mind gym, if you are up for the workout.
But you know, all gyms usually make their money off of people who sign up but don’t come. It’s fine to let the pessimism win every once in a while. However I’d like for you to remember that happiness is something you always get to choose and nobody can take that away from you.
Times like this and being around people who make you doubt the future of humanity can make you pessimistic about the possibilities of the future, for sure. But those people always coexisted with the people you love the most. The people you did trust (hopefully someone like me), the people you loved, the people you’d swear to cherish and adore, they’re still on the face of this earth with you.
I want you to remember that it’s in your domain to be a someone to somebody. Regardless of how other people treat you, you can be someone’s faith in humanity or you can be someone’s proof of failure in humanity. Sometimes it feels like a losing battle, but when I find myself at the pearly gates I would hate to tell myself “I did it because others were doing it to me too”.
You are a powerful person. You always were. You’re having the nightmare of suffering right now, but when you wake up from the dream you’ll find that you haven’t lost any of your power. The power to hope, the power to be happy, and the power to be the faith in humanity. Sending you my love.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
