I Honestly Don't Know How To End this Up!

Me, Myself and I
My mind peoccupies
To be loved and to be happy
Is what I yearn for my destiny

Since the day I was born
All I've wanted is my own
That this very important person called "Me"
To be thwe only that everyone could see

Me, Myself and I
To be the apple of everybody's eye
Like a mother to her infant
No one will ever be more significant

To wake up early and go to school
It's about my future after all
Then with all strength work all day
Leaving no time to rest and pray

Indeed everything is worth for good
To do the best as much as I could
All of these is only to satisfy
The wants of Me, Myself and I

A good life I have acquired
The kind that will make people inspired
Thinking that this is all that life could be
Til emptiness plagued inside of me

Irony! Yes! A big irony
To have a life you've wanted yet still feeling empty
Could this be true? Could this be real?
Wisdom and understanding I appeal

Could someone stretch out and lend me a hand
Take me out from the darkness where I stand
For this place I can bear no more
What the future for Me, Myself, and I is in store

Help me! Help me! Help me!
From this nothingness set me free
That happiness and joy I will truly experience

Shock Absorber!

I was riding in an elevator when i got sudden interest of its parts and the technology that it is using. It's just so amazing how does elevator, especially from that of skyscrapers, able to resist the gravitational energy preventing it from fall and even having a smooth landing in the ground floor. Thanks to the very humble part of the elevator system that is found underneath it - the shock absorber.

Pretty much of my curiosity, i began to question myself how does it feel to become a shock absorber. Perhaps you will be at the bottommost part of the elevator waiting for its going down and once its near you, arms will then be raised; exerting all the energy you have in the body just to give a smooth landing and provide safety to the people inside. Hmmm, that would have been the highest paying job in the world if ever it existed.

In one way or another, people sometimes tend to become shock absorbers. Being the Clark Kent of everyone's life. Wanting to save the world in any way that they can. They think that they can make the world happy; intervening in all situations; preoccupied pleasing people believing that they are strong enough or matured enough and that with their presence everything will be under control. Yes! It sound good right? Great in fact!

Yeah! In one way or the other, all of us have been to the stage in our lives wherein we do hero worship. Boys may worship their fathers to be the man of steel with speed as fast as the speed of light. Eventually we tend to imitate and wanted to become heroes ourselves.

By being a hero of somebody else, it satiates our innate longing of sense of authority and being powerful. They cheer of the people saying,

“You are so strong!”

“You are my knight in shining armor!”

“You are my hero!”

Whew! A sweet aroma to our ears! In as much as we experience the happiness every time we got the feeling of having helped people in their problems, we never realized that we have missed something. Perhaps not just a ‘some-thing’ but it is a big thing – our IDENTITY.

Ever been to a situation of feeling useless when alone and have helped nobody? What about the feeling of inadequacy when alone yet if in the presence of people you will be the one-man showing being able to do everything. That must have been hard to be like that. People-dependent happiness (I need not to reiterate this, I have another longer blog about the thing called happiness) is like a malignancy. Very asymptomatic. At first you will never realize that you have the disease coz it seems like everything is doing well. Happiness somehow overflows. However, at the end of the day when everyone is parting ways, why is there a sudden feeling of isolation, despair, exhaustion!

Wake up! It’s not the people who need your help. It’s you who needs you!

"Being happy isn't a big deal after all."

I happened to browse over the one of my students friendster accounts and there i saw a shoutout from which i borrowed the title of this blog...

When i read the shoutout, 'twas just a common statement for me but ideas popped out of my mind that compelled me in to this writing. The idea that caught my attention is that despite the people's search for happiness (somehow becomes everybody's preoccupation), there's this one student who said that it (happiness) isn't a big deal after all.

What was he thinking? I mean, try typing the word happiness in the yahoo search engine and it will give you a list of more or less 210,000,000 links related to happiness. From quotes to poems to song lyrics to websites to clubs - the central theme is HAPPINESS. I even remembered the movie the "PURSUIT TO HAPPYNESS" by Will Smith which is undoubtedly a breakthrough movie.

With this, I propose that happiness is subjective. It, being subjective, leads to another question, "What makes a person happy?" Allow me to borrow and idea from F. Heylighen stating that "People are happy when they are 'in control', that is, when they feel competent to satisfy their needs and reach their goals." The author dissected this statement. The following paragraphs are taken in verbatim from the same article posted in the internet entitled "Happiness"

To start with, according to F. Heylighen:

Happiness can therefore be seen as an indication that a person is biologically fit (near to the optimal state) and cognitively in control (capable of counteracting eventual deviations from that optimal state), in other words that he or she can satisfy all basic needs, in spite of possible perturbations from the environment. Such control over one's situation has three components (Heylighen, 1992):

material competence:

you must have the necessary resources or opportunities to satisfy your needs. You cannot quench your thirst without water, or satisfy your need for social contact when you are marooned on an uninhabited island.

cognitive competence:

it is not sufficient that the needed resources are there, you must also be able to find them, recognize them and apply them effectively. Except in trivial cases, need satisfaction demands problem-solving skills, i.e. knowledge, intelligence and creativity.

subjective competence:

it is not sufficient that the resources are there, and that you are capable to find them, you must also believe in your own problem-solving capacity. Otherwise you would not be motivated to do the necessary effort.

The problem of promoting happiness then simply reduces to promoting material competence (by providing resources and opportunities), cognitive competence (by education in the broadest sense, and by cognitive aids such as computers), and subjective competence (by making people feel that they are competent or "in control") (cf. Heylighen, 1992).

Now, allow me to give some of my own points of view. The author (I used this because i don't know the author's gender) expressed his/her ideas as clear as crystal. In fact, it gives an affirmation to my idea that happiness is subjective. It is indeed, subjective!

In search of a more vivid picture of happiness, i saw a website that gives many definitions of happiness - www.thehappyguy.com. I'll try to list down some of the definitions:

"Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually." - Stephen Covey

"Happiness is when your mind is thinking through your heart." - Judi Singleton

"Happiness is not merely a life lived by accumulating moments of pleasure. On the contrary, happiness is a long lasting enduring enjoyment of life, it is being in love with living. It is your reward for achieving a good character and personal rational values in life. Some important values are a productive career, romance, friendship and hobbies." - Dr. Ellen Kenner

These are just some of the definitions (if you want to read the other definitions, might as well visit the site). Sigh... Sigh... Why? These definitions have not yet completed the kind of happiness that I would want to define. By the way, there is one definition that I really like. It's from Deanna Mascle and i qoute:

"Happiness for me is to know that my life has meaning and purpose, and that every day my life touches others in a positive way--whether to make them laugh or learn or both at once!"

Whaw! That's it! I strongly believe that in finding happiness, one has to know his/her purpose. Why is that? Knowing the purpose will provide you a path towards the happiness. To elaborate more on this would be this way. Attaining one's goal would definitely make a person happy. But, one has to know his/her goals before he/she can make ways of attaining it. Now, just bear in mind that goal and purpose are somehow synonymous.

What is our purpose in life? Is it to be happy? Or to make people happy? It's actually more than that! Before I'll mention this, I know it will somehow make a bit of issue because not everyone will agree to it. Well, as if I care. All I know is that it is the truth. And in this truth I believe in.

Now, now. This is it! The main purpose of a man's life is to bring glory to God. Glory? Sounds confusing? Okey. Let's make it simple. Glorifying God simply means making Him happy by how we live our life. Of course it takes knowing Him before we will know how He will be happy. In as far as my life is concerned now, I'm more than happy. I call it joy. Wait. Happy. Joy. Aren't they the same? No! They're not! Being happy is dependent with the events around you but joy is within. You can be happy despite bad circumstances in life. If you have God with you and you know that He is a great God and a faithful Father - that He provides all the needs of His children by His abounding grace - then what more could you ask for. As for me, I cling on to that promise. I take joy in serving Him. I'm joyful now; even in not so good circumstances of life, i choose to be joyful because i have a God that takes care of me.

I'm joyful! More than being happy!

And to Arnu's shoutout, well happiness is really what people are up for. You even want to be happy as well. Just face it. Hmmm, i know you have your reason for saying that. But just bear in mind that not everything that makes you happy is the right thing. It has to come form the right goal, from the right perspective, and from the right motive.

Remember, great happiness comes from the ONLY source of it - GOD! Ows, it's more than happiness... It's called JOY!

How Do You Know If You Have Found The Right Person?

What is love? Is it something you can feel? How do people know if they have found the person they could spend the rest of their lives with? It would be easier to know if we've found this person if we could know what love is.

Initially when we meet someone we like there is probably something physical attracting us. We may feel attracted. Then if all goes well - you go out, have a good time, and find you want to spend more time with one another - you may begin to have more feelings for one another. But is this love? Time is the answer to all of these questions and the tester of the relationship.

Keep sex out of the mix. When sex becomes part of the equation things become confusing fairly quickly. Sex is a strong and powerful gift that should only be used in marriage to become more intimate - more intimate than you could without it. Outside of marriage it only serves to destroy any chance of truly knowing if you have love for someone or, if they have love for you.

If your relationship is based on sex you are on an unstable foundation. If your feelings change so will your desire to have sex, so will your so called feelings of love with this person and, the same is true for them. Sex only works if love is the foundation of a marriage relationship.

Feelings change and this makes it an unstable foundation for a relationship as well. A lot of times feelings change when the bliss of sex has worn off or, the things you can't stand about the other person surfaces with more frequency. Sex will cause you to look past the things you can’t really live with in another person. And when sex fails to work for you, all you have left are all those things that irritate you about your partner.

So what is love? If you can keep sex from coming into the picture the time you spend together can help you find out if you can love the person you're seeing. You will learn what their values are. You will learn what makes them tick and what drives them. You will find out if you could love them through the time you spend together.

What are the interests you share? What things are you passionate about together? Are there things that get on your nerves - drive you crazy? Can you live with those things? Are you driven by the same things they are driven by? Do all these interests that you both share cause you to draw closer or, do they make you want to spend less time together? If after you have seen all there is to see in a person and you are still drawn then you are ready - Ready for what? -To make a decision.

Love is not a feeling or an attraction. It is a decision. In all the things you learn about one another you must weigh whether or not you can live with those things. Are the traits in this person the traits you are looking for in a mate? Do their flaws turn you off to the point that you will choose not to love at some point? Is there enough in them that you like and admire for you to make a decision to love them for the rest of your life? See, love is a verb. It is an action word. It is something you decide to do. It is something you make a commitment to do in good times and bad. In other words you are deciding after everything that you have seen that you can still love the person inside.

From the bible here is a description of love:

(4)Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud (5) or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. (6)It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. (7)Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (8)Love will last forever..(1 Corinthians 13:4-8)