Once Upon a Time, A Unicorn Fell off a Bunk-Bed…

18 Commentsadaptive, awareness, Believing is Seeing, conceptual frameworks, happiness, Limbic system, living together, Uncategorized

Life is hard – there’s no denying that.  We tell ourselves that the best way we can deal with it is to forget about being happy.

Head down.

Shoulder to the wheel.

If we can just be successful then we’ll be happier.

But is that true?

This talk makes a very good and comprehensive case for capsizing our conceptual frameworks around being happy.

When all your desires are distilled, you will cast just two votes: to love more, and be happy. Hafiz of Persia.


[ted id=1344]

Photograph – Title: “Happy 2nd Lieutenant William Robertson and Lt. Alexander Sylvashko, Russian Army…” 04/25/1945

Persistent URL: arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=531276

0

18 Comments

  1. Personally I’m tired of all this crap about being successful being the most important aspect of life. Whose big idea was that anyway? Probably one of those personality types that insists on there being a rule for every aspect of human life.

  2. This is a FANTASTIC ted talk!

    Gratitude . . . Journaling about the Positive . . . Exercise . . . Meditation . . . and Random Acts of Kindness.

    Let’s rewire our brains!

  3. What an exquisite way of expressing one of life’s greatest truths. There is joy to be found in everything (an observation about life that is different from being happy, and is something that exists even in the midst of sorrow), but happiness is a choice. It is unfortunate that so many choose to be unhappy, and then blame it on life. . .

    Thanks for this wonderful piece.

  6. I don’t think one has success until one realizes they are happy. I was a very unhappy person until I realized I was choosing/deciding to be unhappy. It took a while and lots of discipline but I am a happy person. I don’t even have to think about it–most of the time :)–I just am. True there are sad and difficult events and times in our lives but how we let them affect us is a choice. And my ideas of what success is or means is different now.

    I feel a post coming on…

    1. A lot of life is painful and reacting to pain as pain is a healthy thing to do – it isn’t a question of whitewashing. The thing is that so many modern westerners are unhappy even though they’ve never been safer, better fed or more secure – as a result we need to examine what we truly want in life and not be held to someone else’s standards. If we were our authentic selves a lot of this would be avoided.

  8. My oldest son called while I was watching the last 30 seconds of this video. He was upset about how our youngest son is behaving during his freshman year of college (oldest son is a 4.0 college graduate – youngest son has HATED school since day one of kindergarten, “I’m never coming back to this place”).
    I imagined the dots in the graph in this video all over the screen (I also questioned the premise that the speaker’s parents were sleeping when he broke the second limb of the unicorn 🙂 ). This was a good thing because I was able to say to my oldest son, “Maybe he (youngest son) is taking a different path. . . and much more motherly stuff.” This diffused oldest son somewhat, ultimately, he will think about it and maybe cut his brother some slack.

    So . . . thanks for the video. I’m happy I spotted that one red dot before the phone rang. 🙂

  9. Loving more and being happy–those two soldiers certainly exhibit that principle in this photo! Loving more IS the best success possible!

Comments are closed.