Changing our Personal Reality; Part 3 (Happiness)

The Time Traveler

About ten years ago I spent a week on a small, remote and largely undeveloped island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Espiritu Santo. It is one of the many islands that comprises the nation of Vanuatu. It’s fair to say that while my accommodation was one star – a hut complete with dirt floor and a bunch of nocturnal creepy-crawlies – my overall experience was five star. I had a total blast. My stay was a case of the sophisticated, educated and moderately dysfunctional city slicker (okay, maybe not sophisticated) stepping into a completely different reality. I felt like I was a character in one of those time-travel movies (a very large Michael J Fox perhaps); which was totally cool because as a kid, time travel was very high on my to-do list. Still is, but don’t tell anyone; might damage my already fragile credibility. For all I knew, it could have been 1,000 AD, not 2,000 AD – so remote and so untouched was this place by technology and modernization. Pure bliss. And as I was to discover, pure joy.

The Happiest People

I haven’t been there for a decade or so but at that time it was a place with no electricity, no sealed roads, no television, almost zero knowledge of the world beyond their shores (not a bad thing), no crime (essentially) and a group of people who were hands down the happiest, least dysfunctional, least inhibited people I have ever met in my life. Ever. And not happy in a “I just won fifty bucks” kind of way, but happy in a “I don’t know how to be any other way”… kind of way. For an entire week I didn’t have one conversation about body-fat, obsessive behaviours, destructive habits, low self-esteem or impending relationship break-ups. Nice. And I didn’t hear one person whine, sook, moan, bitch or complain about anything or anyone. And I had plenty of conversations with lots of people and plenty of opportunities to hear it.

A Tropical Classroom

The unsophisticated, gorgeous and seemingly uneducated people of Espiritu Santo taught me much more than I ever could have taught them. In fact they were very educated; they had need-specific, situation-specific and environment-specific education. In their world I was an idiot. And yes, some would suggest that I’m an idiot everywhere; not just in Vanuatu. Good point. All my “education” amounted to naught in their reality. Sometimes when I was around them I felt stupid. But mostly I felt privileged. And very calm. Mostly. There was a particular time during my stay when I had an overwhelming awareness and realisation that I had made certain parts of my life much more difficult and complicated than they needed to be. Getting away from “my life” and immersing myself in theirs gave me a level of perspective, insight and clarity that I hadn’t really experienced before.

*Note: Sometimes the best way to “see” your life is by getting away from it.

My Brother From Another Mother

These people who earned about ten Australian dollars per week ($7.00 US), had never even heard of terms like Personal Development, Psychologist, Paradigm, Investment Portfolio or Cosmetic Surgery. They played a version of soccer for hours on the beach with a ball made from giant leaves, they fished and hunted for their food and they never stopped laughing, smiling or having fun. Every day, all day, they were happy. And it was no act. During my stay I befriended one of the workers at the “resort” where I was staying. His name was Mackenzie. It still is. He was twenty four, didn’t know what a gym was, had never seen television, never heard of Michael Jordan, Nike, Oprah, the Pope or Madonna, never been off his tiny island, never seen a bitumen road and his favourite foods were chicken, fish and wild dog. Woof, woof. He did however have his own blog.

I made that last bit up.

Hand in Hand

One day we went for a walk because he wanted to show me where his parent’s “house” (i.e. shack to you and I) was. As we walked down the uneven dirt track towards his folks home, Mackenzie grabbed my hand and held it tightly. It’s fair to say that I was somewhat surprised. And uncomfortable. Little did I know that in their culture, when someone is your friend and you are walking together, holding hands is normal. Even if your friend is another bloke. His normal was my weird. His comfortable was my (very) uncomfortable. My dysfunction. My psychological barrier. My self-limiting belief.   

Issues in Paradise

So you can imagine how comfortable Mr. Well-Adjusted, Alpha-Male, Personal Development  Warrior was, walking hand in hand down a lonely dirt track with another man on a beautiful tropical island. A man who happened to be six foot four and had hands like baseball mits. Good grief. His big black work-hardened hands made my pudgy white normal-sized hands look somewhat inferior. And fragile. If my fingers could speak they would have been in therapy for months. Naturally. Let’s just say that, in that situation, one of us had significant issues and it wasn’t my new buddy. Apparently they (my issues) had accompanied me to paradise. Swell. While I wasn’t totally miserable (in that moment), to be completely honest, I wasn’t particularly happy or comfortable with the whole hand-holding situation. It got momentarily worse; he stopped talking and we just walked in silence. I could feel my inferior white hands beginning to sweat. I felt even less happy. By this stage my numerous issues were cart-wheeling around the cerebral landscape that is my mind. And what a fertile landscape it is.

Then something happened.

A Breakthrough

I looked over at my buddy and he was walking in silence with a smile form ear to ear. “Why the big smile”, I asked. “Because I am happy”, he replied. Good answer, I thought. “Why so happy?”, I asked. “Because I have a new friend.” I felt momentarily ashamed. Ashamed that I had allowed my fear, insecurity and numerous issues to rob me of something quite unique (for me), special and dare I say, beautiful. I realised that while we were both walking on the same track, at the same time, to the same destination, we were both having totally different experiences. We were both inhabiting completely different (self-created) realities. Mine; anxious and unhappy. Mackenzie’s; totally relaxed and happy. I was making myself miserable while he was allowing himself to be happy. It took a while for the light to come on for me – unlike my Buddhist friends who have known for thousands of years that:

“Happiness comes not from seeking happiness but from letting go of that which makes us unhappy”

It was at that exact point in time when I decided to embrace the moment. Totally. And in the making of that decision I felt a literal and instant shift from unhappy to happy, from anxiety to calm and from hesitation to openness. Excitement even. “You’re a complete tool”, I told myself. More than any other time in my life, I realised that happiness (or sadness), calm (or anxiety) were things I could create and control. Yes, I would be influenced and impacted by situations and events throughout my life journey, but it wasn’t necessary for me to be determined by them. I knew that if I could dispense with all the negativity, the self-created emotional and psychological bullshit and the self-limiting beliefs, happiness would find me. And it did. I felt my “state” change straight away. At that stage of my journey I was something of an over-thinker and in this instance I had over-thought (definitely a real word) my way into a place I didn’t need to be.

Choosing Happiness

Over the last two decades (and a bit) I’ve worked with many people living in what you and I would call less-than-desirable situations; people with terminal illnesses, people living in poverty and people who have endured hardship (violence, abuse, incarceration, tragedy) that I often found difficult to comprehend. Somehow these amazing people have found their way to happiness– by choice. While many would understandably sink, these people chose to swim. Fly even. While self-pity, misery and desperation would seem the logical outcomes of their “life experience”, they consciously chose and created happiness; even though sadness would have seemed very reasonable and some might say, appropriate. They opted to be all about the solution, not the problem and to find the good rather than to inhabit the bad. They chose to create a reality of happiness.

Not denial or delusion but genuine happiness.

Fear and Worry. Or not.

So over the course of one of the best weeks of my life, my new buddy – the hand-holder with no money, no phone and no five-year plan – taught me all about happiness; not by what he said but by how he lived his life. One day just before I was to leave I was sitting on the beach talking with him about life. I was trying to get my head around how he saw the world. And his world. “So what do you worry about?”, I asked him. He looked at me and seemed almost confused. I asked the question again, this time with a little more explanation. He thought for a moment, looked at me and said “nothing”. “Why not”, I asked. “My life is good”, he said. “Hmm, good point.” “So what scares you then; you must be scared of something?” He thought for a while. “Nothing”, he said. “You must be scared of something?”, I pushed. He thought deeply. “Sharks”, he shared. “Yep, that’s pretty reasonable… anything else?” “Er… no.”

The End.

P.S. The following is irrelevant to the theme of today’s post but you may find it amusing. About a year after my trip I flew Mackenzie to Australia and he spent a (very hilarious) fortnight with me. The hilarity started while driving out of Melbourne airport. “What’s that?” (A boom gate) “What’s that?” (A traffic light) “How does it work?” (I dunno) “What’s that?” (A billboard) “What’s that?” (A skyscraper – he had never seen a building with even two stories – let alone fifty). After an eventful and entertaining drive, I got him back to my place (which he thought must have been the biggest house in the world – in reality just a regular suburban home) and unpacked his clothes into a spare cupboard. As we were doing this he spied a baseball jacket of mine. It was red, blue and white and he loved the colors. “Can I wear it?” he asked. “If you like it, you can have it – but it’s too hot to wear now” (it was mid-summer). He put it on anyway. He wore it every single day of his holiday. All day. After we had unpacked, it was about dinner time so we walked down the street to a local restaurant. He had never been in a restaurant in his life. “What would you like to eat?”, I enquired.

“Dog.”

“Of course you would.”

See you next time x

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