Tag Archives: #contentment

Mental Health

5 Essentials for Building Inner Happiness

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I act often with fear and bravery chasing each other in my eyes… – Olya Aman

Introduction

L. is a good nurse, and that alone tells a lot about her. She was born in Rwanda, adopted and raised in Europe. L. moved back to Rwanda when she learned her way and made sure that helping her patients was her aim in life. After the genocide her native country needed support, her least lucky people needed her knowledge.  

You must not grudge me a little pomp and ceremony about this story. L. is a fine creature, her big almost black identical in size and shape eyes cause people to confide in her. She learned early on to listen, and this skill proved to be invaluable in her profession. 

“Every day is like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again,” she says. “I begin my harum-scarum day and see the transformation, one person at a time.”

People often live with the brow of an optimist above and the jaw of a pessimist below. To make one dominate another is to create real value in life. A positive approach to everything one does helps to build a skill set that makes a smile last a lifetime. Whereas, one sardonic smile can bring gloom that blankets everything around.

1) Negative Thoughts Are as Bad as a Dangerous Plague, and Infinitely as Harmful to Your Health

“I was 12 when my new parents took me to Europe. I have my first memories linked with horror and fear, loss and grief. Those memories shaped my personality and in some way, I am grateful for the background I have. Although, gratitude was not speedy enough to visit me.”

“My good, generous and loving parents had to put up with a lot. I was not an obedient child, rebelling at anything and everything. I was in constant emotional pain at least first five-six years or so. The lesson of the genocide period in Rwanda left my whole being in ruins. Nearly one million people were killed. I lost my family, my friends, everything I ever loved.”

When we feel negative emotions, they surround our brain by a mysterious halo, which shuts off the outside world, limiting our ability to see the way out. Our brain finds it easy to see the raw afternoon and the dense fog, the muddy streets, and the bleak houses. 

You need to make an effort to not letting bad things alone take their own bad way. The world takes gloomy and bright passages, and if you take it off-handedly, it will never go right for you. That is why in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog you need to force yourself to see the light, to shake the negativity off. 

Procrastination, spoliation, evasion, botheration blind your brain, depriving you of the ability to see the options and choices that surround you.

2) How Positive Thoughts Color Our Life in Healthy Beautiful Shades

“Love and patience helped me to gradually come back to believing again. Jane and Matt – my stepparents – are my rocks in life. I owe them my new self, or, rather, the return of my old happy before-the-horror-self. I remember and I mourn, I often cry, but now mostly because of happy memories. I have more of those, you know, and the rest is still here in my heart, but not pressing and as vivid anymore.”

“This transformation came with the knowledge that I wanted to make a change. I was sick for a while at some point. A woman that nursed me in the hospital imprinted the longing for the same profession in me. By that time I knew that Rwanda was in the reconstruction period and the system of health needed human resources. I was going to come back home.” 

The impact of positive emotions on the brain and overall health is hard to underestimate. Joy, contentment, and love open endless possibilities in life, they broaden your mind, make it more prone to new innovative solutions. 

When you seem to be a mass of dull, complaining feelings everything you do may seem distasteful. Gift yourself with optimistic thinking by identifying areas of your life that usually upset you. Each time your thoughts distress you, drive them out or find a way to put a positive spin on them. 

A smile during difficult times lightens the burden of troubles. When you humor everyday misfortunes, you feel less stressed. A good laugh is a luxury, the radiating waves of it break the toughest walls of desperation. 

Our social barometers always should stand at ‘sunny’. Negative people continually war with your happiness. Surround yourself with positive, supportive people who can give help with advice and action. 

3) Motivation is Another Definition of Positive Thinking

“The desire not only to see my country again, but to be able to bring good – my skillset and knowledge – was driving me in my studies. I followed the efforts of Dr. Binagwaho, who spent years helping to rebuild the country’s health care system. She is my hero.”

“The most precious resource of the post-genocide Rwanda was its people. Thousands of community health workers traveled from home to home providing the necessary care. I willingly joined the rural health tribe.”

Life has many costumes and only by looking at it with optimism one can truly value it. Positive emotions prompt useful and valuable everyday activity. Encouraging thinking is a sophisticated weapon in a battle with monotony. 

Building anything requires patience and motivation, both are synonymous with optimism. Only in a state of appreciation you can spark massive changes that can lead to new developments in life.

The ability to stay enthusiastic and hopeful is always located within. Whatever happens outside should not determine your state of mind, for that power rests with you only. So, does not allow an external event to be a disturbance.

4) How to Allow Positivity Reign Amid Chaos

“The health workers were selected by the villages they served. The people of my native village decided that I would care for them. It was the happiest day of my life.”

“The country’s health system has managed to achieve so much progress on a very limited budget. Other poor countries often call this achievement miraculous, I call it challenging. Our dedication to delivering effective health care improves the lives of the poor and that is the best reward we need.”

Do not blame yourself for the lack of calmness, doing so will never bring you to the state of inner joy. Practice awareness of what makes you feel good. Immerse yourself in this activity. Meditate if that makes you display more positive emotions, increased mindfulness, and decreased illness symptoms. 

Explain your inner state of mind in writing. If you note your positive experiences, you will have a better mood level and fewer health problems. 

We are all rooted to our social environment, meeting people we like and … not so much. Schedule fun time with optimistic people. Positivity attracts more of its own self, just being optimistic will make lovely, cheerful people your reality.

 5) Happiness and Success Come Together

“At the end of every day, I am tired and full of joy and sorrow. Both mixed together comprise my life and make it unforgettable. I take both and grateful for both. The new coming day is ever more incredible because of this mixture of emotions and I always start it on a positive foot.”

“I am happy to be home. To lead the life of purpose is stimulating. I often in a state of inward merriment and I encourage myself to prolong this feeling because it is contagious. People around me can feel it and, consequently, become happier from my presence in their life.”

L. is very contented in her profession. She is a link in a chain of remarkable alterations for the better. 

In a positive state of mind you can withstand the passing disappointments and pain. You become a strong personality, the only one controlling your inner state of mind. Happy you, develop new skills with joy, that activity leads to success and that all gives you more reasons to be even happier. Serenity and peace are on your way when you remind yourself of your unbroken positivity.

Conclusion

L. confided in me and gave her permission to share her story. She only asked to make an emphasis on the happy side of it, showing to my readers the importance of positive, grateful approach to life. She mentioned several times that love saved her sanity, and optimism of her parents, being contagious, helped her to get better physically and emotionally.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of positivity. The most deplorable and irreparable results come from deeds made in a state of pessimistic rejection of bright and jolly in life. Whatever comes your way, allow it to be, but experience it with inner belief in a good outcome. A positive approach to life helps you to be preserved and unbroken. It reminds you that what seems distressing at one point in time is a blessing at another. 

Stay tuned… 

Personal Growth

I’m White, He’s Black – We Are on the Right Track

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The rich human diversity is wedged in my family

When you create a family — you become one organism, breathing through one source, looking and moving in one direction. – Olya Aman

I formed the habit of sticking my attention into the venerable instrument of our diverse family. I feel the impulse to pull out our story of my head and heart because I know you can make better use of it.

My Afro-Asian husband

Everything about my husband is a bit stupefying. He has a large, square face, with a massive projecting nose and narrow greenish Asian cut eyes. Black hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead open two distinct parallel straight lines, that meet only at infinity. Grave and weighty in his manner and body, he does everything slowly and massively. Like a locomotive, he melancholy moves through life. Within his setting, I feel indolent and silenced.

Zac’s family, that is his name, is a unique example of the ‘cafeteria culture’. And the only idea of it is beautiful. His father was born and raised in Mexico in a Muslim family. While his mother is a daughter of a Methodist minister. They adopted Zac when he was 4 years old. He identifies himself closely with both cultures and religious beliefs, never feeling pressure coming from either side. The inner climate of their family is always mild and comfortable. They love each other and accentuate their family values on common grounds, minimizing the importance of the differences.

Our union

When Zac was 20, I got pregnant with our first child. We got married for love and forever, family values prevailing in Zac’s perception of the world. I am a woman of a European origin with deep cultural ties and beliefs. My cultural and religious sentiments are softly echoed by his acceptance and loving understanding.

Zac’s interracial, interreligious family experience made him flexible and adaptable to the changing world around. My family got to love this young-looking man with old wisdom lurking in his Asian eyes. Zac’s family accepted his choice with loving humor and serious understanding. The colors of our faces are diverse, the shades of our philosophies are controversial in many aspects — but we have a common universal understanding of the family values.

We have a family brunch once a month, to which all relatives bring their specialties. We celebrate our diversity and remain faithful to our histories.

What I’ve learned from my multicultural ongoing experience

Form a brilliant scheme to focus on shared pricks.

We are all enveloped in and on and under our histories. To make life easy, we slide gently through every circumstance, stressing our common patterns, and minimizing the importance of our differences. Close personal ties with each other are the sweets of life for all of us.

The focus on critical dissimilarities gives the bitter taste that disagrees with any family union. That is why we never cross the line and always stay in a circle of peaceful, polite conversation.

Rejoice at the contrasting blessings of your personalities.

Together we monopolize our differences and celebrate them with respect in our minds and love in our hearts. Because the family union is like a union between two countries — with unique histories and traditions, views and life principles. To maintain peace may be a laborious process, but it for sure is rewarding.

Respect has a lot of hand in building our family union. We learn to accept the cultural identity of each other and have judgment enough to distinguish between historical and religious differences that are important and those which are not. Any dissimilarities are not the instruments of destruction, but the triggers that move our curiosity forward.

Artlessly admit extended family connections.

We united the best blessings of existence when we decided to raise a child. We care a great deal for each other, that is why we are open to connect with members of our extended families and are eager to introduce our offspring to the variety of family relationships.

The chances are that the child will be a gainer if loved by many relatives and experienced in various cultural situations. Life with little and sometimes bigger difficulties and privations is not damaging but strengthening if you can look at your family and see the rock that will always hold you firmly on the ground.

To pursue a happy family union, everyone in it should help each other out of the deepest gulfs of human miseries. In the sequel of life, the family union is the only harbor that can give us the taste of happiness and peaceful harmony. – Olya Aman

Stay tuned…

Mental Health

My Struggle With Hatred After My Boyfriend Was Killed

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Do not let hate make you old and stale and faded

I was beside her, wrapped around her, melting in my anger… – Olya Aman

I was almost abnormally fond of Adam.

The little dimples on his cheeks were driving me crazy. He was the only means of complete and ineffable happiness, the very essence, which I defined as Life.

His heart stopped beating and the Hatred to the person (who drove the car in a state of alcohol intoxication, killed my boyfriend, and remained almost unharmed) began to control my existence with innate satisfaction.

This experience turned my understanding of Hate and Hatred bottom side up.

I meditated on my hate, crying quietly, shouting inwardly. I was utterly desperate in my desire to inflict the same suffering upon a person responsible for that devastating emotional pain, soul-torture, the heartbreaking outcry of my whole being.

I will share my love story with you in a few well-chosen silences, and the story of my hate — in several emotional words.

1) Try to accord with the disturbing person.

The ghost of an idea to get to know that person better (and if not to forgive, but at least to free my spirit from a tormenting feeling of anger, that didn’t let me breathe fully, function satisfactory, and live bearably) invaded my thoughts.

I visited Mary in prison for eighteen months and four days after the car crash. The expression on her face told me wordlessly that I should (if I would be so kind) spend a moment in her presence, make an effort to not shout from inner pain, listen if she had anything to say, have a look into her eyes for just a fraction of a second… and just be quiet.

Mary’s apocalyptic face, whiter than Death’s itself, seemed incapable of even a glimpse of a smile anymore. I felt my hatred if not slipping away but for sure diminishing. In front of me, there was a woman that made a fatal mistake, a mother that could not be beside her kids, a wife that lost her husband’s trust and love.

I, for one, had her to blame. Mary had gone on every night without the consolation of exoneration.

2) Keep in close touch with your motives.

After the meeting with the person who killed my boyfriend, I was unhurriedly and calmly propelling myself toward recognition of my loss and acceptance of my fate.

I did not forgive Mary, I still felt the pangs of hate often. That was a huge step forward to a new life, where moments without this suffocating feeling were visiting me more and more often.

I had never in my life so perfectly understood (even to the most exquisite nuances) that state of hatred I lived in for so long.

But before that meeting, I had not even one-third the command over it. My ability to distract my thoughts and recover some balance in my feelings ranked better with each new day.

3) Thrust hateful shock upon a paper.

Although my loss was the unspeakable and the unwritable history of agonizing anger and bitterness, I created by some occult process of self-mastery a diary of perfectly cruel time in my life. I wrote about the perpetrated deed of self-distraction committed by hatred.

I wrote down my feelings partly because I wanted to get rid of that hate, and partly because I wanted to have a shred of evidence in the form of a written word of that time, to justify my desire to live when my lover was not among the living, to show him that I still loved and suffered tremendously from that loss.

4) Value trustworthy spectators and listeners.

I could not push this pain off or away, but I started to talk about it with people who cared to listen.

By doing so, I rose from the domain of the inner prison cell I used to live in one on one with this feeling of hatred.

I appeared on the surface where friendship and love of close people and consolation saturating from every encounter could help me recover and drift peacefully along with the current of life.

5) Breathe a tepid skepticism and sickly dislike out.

From all the indescribable I had known, definitely, the most intense one was the feeling of overwhelming loss, pain, and hatred mixed together.

This cocktail made me sick to my stomach and dizzy in my head.

I learned a special breathing technique to help me manage this dreadful inner hullabaloo tornado of disruptive feelings.

It helped me to diminish that absolute and incurable hysteria of emotions and, with time, to extract it from my life almost completely.

6) Ease your pain in the certitude of positive and healing forgiveness.

I visited Mary, the unfortunate driver who killed my boyfriend, only once.

I could not force myself to go to prison again. In one more year after our encounter, Mary was released.

When that piece of news was announced in an official letter, I felt bitterly disappointed. Were thirty months in prison enough to pay for the taking of someone else’s life?

I was despite myself with grief. The feeling of hate overwhelmed all my entire being all over again.

The authorities forced our second encounter on me. I needed to be present at the release meeting, where Mary would declare her remorse, ask to believe in her renewed self, and plead to be forgiven.

What a hellish thing it was to sit through it. I could not lift my eyes to see her talking. When most of the time elapsed, the door opened and two pairs of huge black buttonlike eyes entered the room.

A three-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. Mary’s husband divorced her while she was in prison, but being a good father brought the kids to see their mother on the day of her release.

The spectacle was refreshing for my feelings. Now I stared all eyed in the scene of devoted love of a mother and unconditional love of her children.

I leapt to my feet and made for the door to shut it and never see these people again, to close that chapter of my life, and be partially contented with the idea that I could not hate this loving mother anymore and hopefully would never see these people again.

Mary and her family moved to a different state, away from the memories and people who can judge her and bully her kids in school. Away to start a new life.

Let me tell you what I know for sure.

Hate is the most uncomfortable, impoverished, and disagreeable feeling to live with.

It sucks the life-giving energy from a human being like a hungry vampire from an unfortunate victim. It is inhaled together with humiliation, mistreatment, and a feeling of impotence.

As an artificially grown black rose, that you may buy to go to the funeral, this feeling cannot becomingly complete a bouquet of beautiful and kind emotions. It spoils the entire picture, sticking out and disgustingly protruding.

Forgiveness and compassion can help to avail this sickly atmosphere.

To say ‘No’ to distractive thoughts means to see better days. Start a journal of positive recollections and put yourself in a contented state every time you read it.

Sometimes things you write may be appalling and rereading those is inflicting even more pain. Tearing up or burning, though, on the contrary, is releasing yourself, freeing your spirit — making it flexible, prone to change.

Close, loving people represent all the vast conscious world of consolation, empathy, and emotional and physical support.

Relax in a company of a friend, the one you can talk a long time to, who will be attentive and intense, who will drink it all in and will help you release your pain, anger, and misery.

Keep washing away negativity with tenderly chosen words of self-compassion that you inwardly voice with each count.

The first note of peace will strike when you inhale in slow fives, hold for another 5, and then let it go with the final 5.

Treat yourself to a luxury of positive visualization.

Feel your detestation passing away with each breath.

Stay tuned…

Mental Health

Gratitude Motivation: 6 Ways to Be Cheerful

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I was armed at all points. It was a pleasure to be so completely equipped for the life battle with my gratitude weapons being polished steel. – Olya Aman

Introduction

T. was a generous spirit. He had all the illumination of wisdom, and yet he was distressfully dying. There seemed to be a happy symmetry in this unhappy depiction of his life. I was touched with wonder at the depths of perception of which this person was capable. His unselfish belief in the idea that gratitude is a way to make the most of life was something I could set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…

T. had a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in him – which is exactly what I needed to shake my world to the bottom and have a chance to find myself in the thrashed around pieces of it. I hung on every syllable he uttered in his diary, and received, as oracles, all he wrote.

With gratitude, your mind is never cold. It enjoys the pleasure of sincere appreciation of what you have. The positivity behind this feeling is always present. It gives food for pleasurable emotions and breaks the monotony of life. You become intolerable to negative thoughts, odious to your soul, they are smashed by every supreme moment of complete kindness and compassion.

In a grateful state you live as thirsty men drink – sleep with spirit, eat with joy, communicate with virtue, and, to crown the whole, your health becomes void of all those sicknesses that originate from harmful emotions. They have no power over you, your cheerful temper and uplifted spirit keep your bodily health unstained.

1) Gratitude Is a Way to a Far-Reaching and Infinite Happiness

“Of parents extremely poor and extremely honest, it was next to impossible that I could paint my life other than in grateful colors. Our family seemed to be possessed with a kind of intellectual gaiety at the times of the most troublesome hardships. We were able to starve any thoughts of misery and lack of appreciation entirely away by just a mere force of heartfelt love to each other and to the life itself.”

“I often was bruised and felt scant of breath but never ungrateful. Every misfortune walked me away from despair and gave me the key to patience. I was a sick-nurse to my father (my mother died when I was 28 and my father and I never fully recovered after that loss). I was seriously out of health. I caught a violent cold right after the saddest day of our life, which fixed itself on my lungs and threw them into dire confusion.”

No day can go without a speck of some misfortune. However, if you spend at least a moment a day recollecting it with humor and praise with gratitude the opportunity to learn from it – it becomes impossible to let uneasy thoughts hunt you for long.

Be ready to undertake 5 minutes each morning portraying yourself reading a poem about a coming day, composing a piece of wonderful music that will accompany you throughout it, or drawing a beautiful picture that will depict a culminating point of it. While doing it, keep in mind that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Every now and then put your thin forefinger on your lips and remind yourself of many blessings in your life that you are sincerely thankful for. Kiss it with a smile on your lips and imagine embracing yourself tenderly. This mode of actions will set every nerve in your body quivering with happy vibes.

2) Gratitude Makes You Light and Incapable of Stupidity

“I had good winters and poor winters. I basked in the sun and went to bed when it rained. And I never forgot to spend a few moments a day reflecting on the things in my life I was blessed with.”

“I was always so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice that the experience of knowing me for a short while had been insufficient to satisfy my acquaintances, and those people lingered about me longer to build friendly ties with me stronger. This way I had a daily meeting with someone to be thankful for, an old friend reminding of himself to be grateful for, and a promise of a future pleasant contact to be longing for…”

There is more in the bond with other people in your life that you can put a name to. The real fact is that the knowledge of being respected and loved raises a presumption against unhealthy relationships. It is as if you put a protecting charm on the arm you use to stretch to shake hands with other people.

If you train yourself to care only for truth and kindness, and believing that two intelligent and friendly people ought to look for healthy relationships together, you will feel a great desire to be social, to share your grateful spirit with others.

3) Gratitude Drains the Cup of Health to Your Benefit

“I was determined to live longer, although the doctors professed the limit till just two-and-thirty. Imputing it to nothing but grateful feelings, which for ought I knew, prolonged my life extremely, I was able to make it to these days, waaay past forty.”

“When I was in pain I more often smiled than scowled. That was the foundation of my beauty despite of my many limitations. I had love enough but not too much, I had loss a lot but not unbearable. Had I lived my life again in every detail of desire, temptation, pain and surrender, I would have chosen the exact life I lived to the very aspect of sickness and every element of loss.”

Every day is a blank page, a pure white surface, and you are the only one able to paint it successfully in bright colors. Use art and guile, talent and temper, recognizing friendship, avoiding a mistake and taking care of the state of your body and mind.

Do not let yourself to be easily crushed by negativity. Evoke a multitude of grateful pictures in your mind and thirstily drain the cup of a happy and healthy life.

4) Gratitude Brakes the Monotony of Your Daily Life and Boosts Your Career

“My business affairs never were a dull round of searching a way to follow money, but a charming mode of meeting my expectations. I had a right mixture of the detached and the involved when doing a job which made every day in the office a splendid harmony of classic, calculated activity of the mind, and graceful, whining movement of the body.”

“Gratitude gave me that easy confidence of manner. Always quite up to everything, I was a sort of person you could depend on, and that made me splendidly respectable by my partners and coworkers.”

To build a successful career is to cut clean out of your life scorching pessimistic thinking. Do not let anyone or anything to throw you off an equilibrium which gratitude creates. Networking is gaining in strength by the contented approach. Above all, decision making improves more from good-humor than from gloomy concentration.

Gratitude, when truly genuine, makes you eager to listen, and this skill is essential for managing people and organizations.

5) Gratitude Feeds You by a Spring of Inexhaustible Positive Emotions

“I took no notice of negative people and very little of pessimistic acquaintances. The wealth of positive emotion awakened pleasure and added loveliness and virtue to my life. My heart being overcharged with grateful feelings, made me exposed to the goodness of the world around me. I was able to describe delight, peace of mind, and soft tranquility on paper, voice it to my friends, charge with it my family, and radiate it to the objects, and atmosphere around.”

Wrap yourself in happy memories, grateful emotions, and generous hopes. An open-hearted life is a possible perfection and must be treated with passion and love. Clear, bright, radiant emotional state certainly depends on what you feel toward yourself and others. The actual amount of pleasure you receive from life is exactly proportional to the expanse of compassion and gratitude in the air you are breathing in.

6) Gratitude Resides in Glad and Flourishing Personalities

“The fervency of my personality trembled from sunlight and fragrance. Gratitude created a barrier that was guarding me against cold and cheerless. Like any freezing temperature, those kinds of feelings could preserve but never let life to be developed. Any progress was stopped when in an atmosphere of a pessimistic refrigerator.”

“I looked on nature and my fellow-men and didn’t see the dark and gloomy. The cheerful colors prevailed, and those were reflections from my own grateful eyes. A clear vision was developed in the balmy atmosphere of positive vibrations. My mind rambled at its pleasure and every valuable information was deeply curved in it. My personality flourished with every grateful feeling and every glad emotion.”

Gratitude is the first warm ray of sunshine that, as the story tells us, makes the traveler throw the cloak from his shoulders, when the storm blows as it will, cannot tear it from him. You do not cringe away from the winds of life. Being ready to show appreciation to every obstacle on your way, you supplement them by profitable lessons that make you even stronger.

It does you a good turn when you appear less materialistic, self-centered and more optimistic, and spiritual. Gratitude makes this change possible. It compels you to achieve your goals without any anguish of uncertainty because success does not matter as much as the opportunity to test yourself.

Conclusion

T. died at forty-eight. When I saw him last, he evidently found great difficulty speaking. He waited long to collect himself, and then he murmured simply: “Take this,” and he handed me his diary. That book had a voice that dropped deep into my soul.

The last page contained a message: “Pain passes, but love remains. We suffer so much sometimes. I’m very old when I think about it, but I grow young again when I believe in generous mistakes that hurt, happy tears that burn, and deep adoration that squeezes the heart till every drop of love is revealed. And the only way to see the beauty in life is to be able to open your eyes every morning with extraordinary grateful gladness. Only this feeling will make you beyond the reach of pain.”

Let gratitude to excel every other quality. It would be a relief to cherish people over material things. If you recognize the need to build a habit of practicing appreciation, it will have an exhilarating effect on your nervous system. You will feel calmness and composure in difficult situations when dealing with people, philosophic equanimity facing cataclysms of nature far beyond all human power, and happy in your own quiet way when giving love and returning kindness.

Stay tuned…

Personal Growth

In a Field of Battle With Regret, You Must Either Slay or Be Slain

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My boss fell in love with me and laid me off

Regret made me goofy. Sorrow gave me an enigmatic flavor. – Olya Aman

I was out of heart

The existence of conscience makes the claws of regret sharp. And the stronger one, the deeper the other can penetrate a sensitive flesh. The depressing influence of this feeling creates the sensation of a jail in a living body. This emotion casts a grim look on life. The damp atmosphere that regret creates is suffocating. We need to learn how to dispel the smog from the past and at the same time to keep our hearts from being dried-up.

I was out of humor and out of heart. It has been almost two years now, but my grief grew fast and furious with every succeeding year. My best friend, the one I was secretly in love with, died from heart failure. Miraculously, we were at the stop sign when it happened, the horn of a car announced the death. His innocent and pathetic face was radiant with new happiness. I couldn’t help wondering how he could be so glad to leave me alone. Sitting on a front passenger seat, I unconsciously called to mind a portrait I saw in a gallery some years ago. The painter neglected the background, reserving all the magic of his brush for the quiet, happy face of a man. My friend at that moment looked just like him, as if he had caught the golden glory of heaven on his countenance.

Arm-wrestling with the past

The catastrophes of previous days can darken with a shade of remorse the future ones. Some deeds are done impetuously, others are out of our control. To weather those storms of life and not to be worn out is the actual purpose of their existence. There is no way to change what’s done, so no need to stamp life with the print of past adversities.

He felt discomfort in his chest for a few weeks before the terrible culmination on that day. I mentioned to him several times that he needed to see a doctor. I blamed myself for lack of persistence. And the regret I felt had a sensation of almost maternal protection. Its watchful eye never left my side. It didn’t let my mind wander elsewhere. Some days I could feel the throbbing of his heart as if he was pressed in an affectionate embrace close to my chest. Those days were worse than others.

I would do impossibilities to bring him back. I owed my happiness to him. It felt like an explosion now when he was gone. And I could not pick up the fragments with all the care of an antiquary I applied. I became stifle. My mind and soul were on fire, and that blaze seemed to gleam from hell. There was no space left for new emotions.

That dark, evening power that dominated in my life had some magnetic energy that attracted empathetic people. There are some ways of looking at you that seem to penetrate your soul. I looked at people and made them feel as though they had nothing on. That irritated a lot and captivated many. After all, that sorrow I endured gave me that Renaissance’s ‘Juliet’ flavor. And my gloomy voice could talk the language of enigmatic gallantry of that time.

I often was behind handed with my work, but my senior manager closed his eyes on every mismatch in my schedule. The tension was growing. I could not see the outpouring lava of affection that I excited. My handsome boss was on fire, like a human volcano he loved me with the fierce of unchained nature.

But I was a different person after 2 years of mourning. I gazed about me with a saddened eye, paying attention to the dim side of life. That desire to expand every misfortune in daily life and minimize the impact of many little jolly things was roasting me alive. I needed thunder and lightning to wake me up and transform that death-like, sepulchral look into my regular prior-to-the-fatal-day features.

My heart finally spoke to me, and I happened to take to it. The blow of losing a job served as a curing disaster that shook my essence. When enough time was given to self-wandering, I realized that there were still pages in my life book that I had not read.

Let me tell you what I’ve found on those pages

Arm-wrestling with the past is an exhausting and worthless process. A positive view on days-by-gone creates a profusion of loving energy that motivates a person in his life. Occurrence in the past, bad or good, is a wonderful lesson that builds personality. Everyone is unique because every experience is individual. The way one interprets it determines his success or failure in life. There is no way to change the past, but altering your attitude towards it is magical.

Give a new turn to your thoughts

To be more ardent, more eloquent, more entrancing is a process of growth that often goes hand in hand with ill luck and pain. For the sake of my future happy life, I’ve decided to respect my past. That experience was a tombstone that kept the castle of my unique personality firm and steady. In the enormous mileage of the past, everything is a blessing. Tears poured over some broken expectations should teach a lesson of breathing through the pain and moving with a renewed and re-skilled hope.

Revert the importance

Life is cooler when sometimes less weight is given to the important and more value devoted to the trifling little jolly things. So, in other words, performing a blah with sarcastic importance and taking important for a mumbo-jumbo is quite a good key to a lighter step in life. Various pieces of information assemble the personality and it just happens so that misfortunes give a more positive outcome in terms of helpful life tools than merry experiences could have done.

Let the past be your capital

Trudging timidly through life was a punishment that I inflicted on myself when consciously dwelled on the past with disappointment in my mind. I decided to consider my past experience as a capital that can help me to take the right turn in the right moment in the future.

The result proved to be magnificent

I do not have greedy teeth for blessings, but always remember to be grateful for every little merry moment. That is why life is good-natured to me now. Happiness is the poetry spoken in a woman’s voice. I had my second chance to hear the poem of my life.

Now I and my ex-boss listen to those delicious sounds together.

Stay tuned…