1
I don’t say this to show off, and I don’t mean anything dark by it either.
But lately life has been so calm that it has started to feel dull. Strangely enough, I now find myself hoping for a storm — some chaos to blow through my life. I can’t explain why, and I can’t say whether wanting this is healthy.
But it’s when cracks open up in my life that I feel most alive.
2
The world is objectively fair. What we call unfairness is something humans invented for themselves.
In the eyes of the Creator, everything balances out: poverty and wealth, health and sickness, kindness and cruelty — every pair of opposites the human mind can conceive.
In the end, everything comes down to a feeling, an experience.
The Creator, being scrupulously fair, set two things in place:
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Happiness has a ceiling (unlike wealth, which is boundless)
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Happiness is within arm’s reach (meaning it requires no preconditions at all)
Extreme happiness doesn’t lead to anything unexpected, but extreme suffering can destroy a person. Most of what people chase — wealth, reputation — has no upper limit, yet happiness does. In a sense, if you agree that the purpose of life is to seek happiness, then none of those seemingly endless things can lift us to any greater happiness.
Happiness sits within reach — you could almost call it cheap. It isn’t a material thing; it’s a state of mind. What determines happiness is nothing more than one’s outlook, and the truest measure of an outlook is how much good faith and optimism you bring to the people and things around you. Say someone attacks you with words, tries to smear you. To one kind of person, that is an insult — an outrage to be answered with anger, maybe even with fists. To another kind of person, it is providence: a lesson sent to teach humility, a reminder of one’s own limits and smallness.
The world is fair. So I won’t gloat over what I have, and I won’t tear myself down or sink into gloom over what I lack.