Key to happiness

What’s one goal every human, no matter what age, gender, origin, religiom wants to achieve in life?
It’s not money.
It’s not beauty.
It’s not fame either.

It’s happiness.

Now of course everyone’s asking: Is there an ultimate key to happiness? Or a recipe you could follow?

As far as I know, there’s not.
But over thousands of years, humanity and especially some brilliant and experienced minds like Buddha, Confucius and Socrated developed some proverbs and wisdoms about how one can achieve happiness.
I’m really interested these sayings so I’ve read, heard know a lot. And with a lot I do mean a couple of hundreds. I’ve read through books, researched the web and spend much much time thinking about these proverbs, their meaning and how realizable they are in our everyday lives.

One of them impressed me so much that I wanna share it with you guys today.

“The less you care, the happier you are.”

At first view, it seems a little naiv, doesn’t it. After all, life is a serious issue and if no one would care about anything, wouldn’t it be but a chaos?
However, this is not the way we’re supposed to understand it. The point is not that we shouldn’t care about anything. The point is our attitude towards life. We just take things too serious. No matter if it’s job, friends, relationships, health – whatever. We are tied up in knots, lost in details and worry about things we are not supposed to worry about that much. Sometimes, when we want something to happen, we are extremely consequent and want it to happen exactly the way we want.
But here’s the deal: Life is what’s happening while we’re busy planning.

We have to lean back a little more, relax and accept things how they are. There are things we are able to change. But there are also some facts that are just fixed. We are wasting our energy trying to change things that cannot be changed. And we all know situations like this. A break-up, for example. What’s better: Running after the ex, begging them to give us another try – or relax, at least trying to let it go and accept the situation. Another example: Let’s say everyone in your family has beautiful sapphire blue eyes. However, you mysteriously got brown eyes. Yoi wanted to have these gorgeous sapphire blue eyes like everyone else for all your life. But what’s the point in being miserable because of that? You can’t change it anyway, can you? There are two ways to solve a problem. Either change the situation or change your attitude towards it. And if the first one can’t be applied – we are always able to change our attitude.
The same with people: Some people just tend to talk in a nasty way about us. We all know them – the sneak around us, watching us and look for flaws. Once they found them – and mostly it doesn’t take very long because who’s perfect? – it’s a big deal and here we go: Another round of the two ‘s’: slandering and slamming. Why do we worry about this? Why do we let people bring us down that don’t matter? WE CARE TOO MUCH.

So what “The less you care, the happier you are” really wants to say is, instead of going with the flow of life, enjoying the beauty in everything and having a good time, we are struggling with striving against the stream, not accepting situations or people and wanting to change something where there’s nothing to change. Too often, we have a narrow mind and can’t be happy with another solution. Even if this solution might be equally good. Or even better…?

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