Tag Archives: #happylife

Personal Growth

4 Ways to Make Your Relationship Strong

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There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose. – Charles Dickens (“David Copperfield”)

1) Start Every Encounter With 100% Effort 

There is no such thing as “give-me-and-I-give-you” relationships. Start every encounter with 100% effort to do the best you can for the other party and that will transform your life. That desire to own someone completely settled in every heart. And from there this unruly longing puts together selfish schemes. It puts ‘must-s’, ‘has to-s’, ‘should –s’ in your way, so that you only give if you know that you will get something back. Stop thinking that the other person must, has to and should do this and that for you, because You did a good deed. Let your left hand create unconditional kindness and do not let the right one know about it. 

2) Do Not Expect Any Payback 

Either from that person or in any other form you will get twice as much. The universal law of boomerang doesn’t make mistakes. It regains more speed and comes back with much more force, good or bad – you decide. The same law governs the “country of two people”. If both of you give 100% of your love, care, attention, understanding, respect – you can get a hold of happiness.

3) When You Put Into Force the Power of Devotion and Unconditional Love

When you take the person beside you as a gift to you and you relish this gift with care and admiration; when you consider that person your soulmate, the one that is going to be always with you no matter what, in good or bad – then you will get what you expect. But if you ponder your relationships as something “not-for-ever”, “today-here-tomorrow-not”, and take it for granted – you also get exactly what you expect. 

George Eliot expressed the significance of this union like no other: “What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.” 

4) When an Essential Ingredient for Your Happiness Is Missing 

Some people tend to anticipate a change to the worse in their partner and prepare themselves for it. This attitude serves as a protective mechanism: “When it happens – I will be ready, and it won’t be so painful, so I better love him/her less.” In this case an essential ingredient for your happiness is missing: the ultimate trust and belief in you both. 

Conclusion

Think about it for a moment: your kids will love you – yes, but they will have their own lives with their own spouses and children. You need someone who will be with you forever. Someone who won’t care how your looks change, as you get just more beautiful with the years going by, accumulating wonders inside.

To grow together, to prosper, share ups and downs, support each other every step of the way… Don’t you want that to be your reality? Let it be. Be ready to give 100% of yourself to a loved one.

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead out daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. – Paul Pearsall

Don’t take it for granted. Say thank you every day and not just once.

Stay tuned…

Personal Growth

3 Reasons to Welcome Changes and Self-Change

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Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw

1) People Change 

It is normal to think one way today and to have a completely different point of view the next day. You may have in your circle of friends and acquaintances some people that always keep their old beliefs strong as a brick. These people do not even question the validity of those beliefs and don’t consider any judgments, believing, that just the idea of obtaining extra information (to clarify and make sure what they think is true is still this way at present) is an offense. If you have someone like that around you, you know how hard it is to talk with that kind of person. And you most likely try to either not even talk on that matter or do your best not to be left alone with that person at all. 

2) It Is Normal to Change Your Mind 

There is a ton of new information circling around us every second. And something we believed was good yesterday is not that way anymore today. Look at the medical world: a few years ago mothers were made to believe that breastfeeding is not as beneficial for babies as the formula was. But scholars changed their minds and revealed the undisputable benefit of mother’s milk. 

3) We Should Grow and Growth Requires Change

Without growth, life is not sweet at all, and growth requires change. The same is true with the people that surround you. You may find comfort in the company of a few select friends mostly because at this very moment they think in a similar way and you share similar views. And you still can be close, although your life path leads you to a different destination. You find new people to share your thoughts and to teach you new skills. 

Conclusion

It makes life an incredible adventure when you let in new impressions that new people bring. You may not be as open to taking the first step and saying “hi.” That’s not a big deal. There are plenty of people that enjoy doing it, so you just need to welcome that approach. The more people you meet, the more you listen to them – the more receptive your brain becomes to the “people reading” skill. And to develop it is one of the main keys to success in life.

Stay tuned…

Mental Health

Chronicles of a Hospice Nurse: Life Lessons Learned the Hard Way

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How you can be the richest person in the world

I am an artist that combines human unfulfilled dreams, last painful regrets, and agonizing pleadings into the greatest masterpiece this world had ever seen. – Olya Aman

I am a hospice nurse. I witness the end-of-life every day. I’m an expert in emotional and physical pain elimination. Physical pain is taken care of with the help of drugs; emotional—with the help of letters I offer my patients to write. I come home after work and reveal my daily impressions to my diary. It helps me understand the meaning of life, and our place in it.

Life most foul

Martin, a patient on a deathbed, is very weak. He has only a day or two left. Enough time to respond to a question, “Martin, you are dying. Who do you care about? What message do you want to send to those whom you love? This is a pen and a paper. I promise to deliver your letter.”

Martin laughs convulsively, shaking all over. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. All that emotion is tearing him apart. I can see the pain crippling down his throat.

A skill of commanding love is the only and the biggest blessing in life. To gain it be a Herculean task for me, much harder than to become a millionaire many times over. – Olya Aman

It is a beautiful experience: a handsome elderly man, with thin lips that forgot how to smile, and grey eyes that didn’t remember how to show pity or compassion. This person is transformed into the naïve boy he once was. The boy that used to believe in love and remember how that feeling could rejuvenate and heal. The boy that was generous in a way where he did not want it returned. He used to let himself forget what he had done for others, and because of that he never missed love.

Instruments of self-destruction

Martin responds with emotion, “Nothing. Listen! Nothing came easy for me in this life. Everything I had I needed to fight for. Gnaw out like a mad dog, breaking the teeth and trying to chew through all obstacles on my way — human or material. I didn’t care. And you know what? I buried my claws deeper in the human flesh rather than other things and I enjoyed it.”

Martin is overtaken by his memories. They haunted him for a long time and now he lets them out, freeing his mind and soul from their oppressing presence. He continues with passion, “But… Ha… everything I thought worth fighting for was irrelevant. The mere fog that is fading away at the sight of a brighter ray of the sun, running in fear of nonexistence. It is all… the houses I had, the cars I cared so much about, the jewels I traded for the pleasure of possessing another beautiful face, sensual body, and empty eyes — all of it was nothingness and left me when I went broke.”

There were many wars where Martin was marching with the flag of success, recognition, and money. Those were of no true importance. Nothing was left. An emotional lack was reining in his life. The understanding of this truth is torturing and rejuvenating at the same time. His following words prove it:

“Now I know, a skill of commanding love is the only and the biggest blessing in life. To gain it proved to be a Herculean task for me, much harder than to become a millionaire many times over. I had this skill when I was a kid. I lost it when I put money first on my scale of priorities.”

A moment of meaningful silence

Martin sobs, hiding his face in his hands. A moment of meaningful silence. I love this shared minute of wisdom. I never interfere. I let him experience this ocean of new feelings, wave after wave until his lungs can take this emotional fragrance and inhale it greedily, viciously.

Martin continues to open his heart to me and to himself, “I’ve lost everybody who cared about me. Everybody who I thought would be ever-present in my life by some weird universal law and with no effort on my side. Am I the only one who makes such a mistake? I traded Alive for Soulless. They needed me, my love, my attention, and my time. The most valuable things I never shared with my family. Then I thought it was too late.”

Martin was a traveler in a desert. His life was a sandy plain with mirages of abundance and each of them turned out to be another sandstorm that swept away one by one everything real in his life.

They say tears are not words, and words are not tears. Now, sitting by Martin’s bedside, I can tell that tears and words are inseparable. Every word he utters is a drop of regret, love, passion, and compassion, “No. The truth is — I was too proud to ask for forgiveness, too arrogant to make the first move. And now I am alone. They would have been beside me right now if I had been with and for them before. No one will miss me. No one! I have nothing to write on this paper because there is no one you can deliver it to.”

Martin dictates. I write. Now there are no tears to accompany his words. He was obsessed with such a common sickness of possession. He thought luxury could substitute for the warmth of loving humans. Every new object he obtained was draining his soul, making his heart numb — tough like a stone. He lost connection with his wife and son many years ago. I addressed his letter to his now grown-up son.

How you can feel like the richest person in the world

Many people strive for the material advantages of this world with more love of display than good, kind inclinations. When a person reaches his nadir, his impasse — there is no time for playing the ‘Pride in Prejudice’. To lead the idle life of bare-faced money hunting may be good when you’re young and healthy. But what are you going to take with you when time is up?

Money may literally vanish into thin air and you will be left only with people you’ve managed to cherish, and memories you’ve managed to create. Only the things that are burnt into your memory will accompany you on your last stroll in life. Memories that heighten your wisdom in the ‘Good-Deeds’ department will strike a reliving note. And quite the opposite happens if you can only remember a scorching hankering for riches and swallowing people up in an eager rush for it.

What can you do?

Schedule a ‘confessor’ time in your day. Protected from prying eyes by the leafy screen or comfy walls, pay a deserved homage to your thoughts about life and death. Negative the idea of selfishness completely during this time. You’ll feel that ultimately we all love the same things: kind relations, dear caring friends, and innocent creatures.

Don’t let yourself live in a mental fog made of false life-values. Do you perceive the terrible gravity of such existence? Do not be tongue-tied when you talk to yourself and bow pretenses out of your life with an impatient “Tchah!”

The words of kindness and love should occur throughout your self-conversation with the regularity of a leitmotif, and in the nick of time, you will feel yourself the richest person in the world.

Stay tuned…

Parenting

Happy Memories Last a Lifetime If You Know This Simple Truth

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My mom shaped our delicate souls with unconditional love

The snow was deep, the morning was happy, and the planned activity for the day was the most cheerful. A nearby forest was a place for kids’ games and enchanted stories about hidden treasures. The kids from the entire village gathered their sleds, skis, and simple hunks of plastic (those were the best things to sled down the main hill) and met at the designated place.

I put on my best coat. That white-pinkish fake fur made me look like a tiny cloud of thick mist on skinny legs — and taking my makeshift sledding gear, I ran to meet my friends. We had a blast! My face was red, my lips chapped, and my eyes watered from the frosty air, happy shouting and too much laughing.

When I came home at last, much later than my mom allowed me, I looked like a drenched grey mouse. My lovely fur turned into a dirty wet mass. The look on my mother’s face said more than words could. But she composed herself, closed her eyes, and sighed with a soft smile on her lips.

I understood fully her words many years after. At that time, they only meant that she was not cross with me, “You know I love you, cutie pie. Life is a collection of happy moments, so let us have another one together. I will make your favorite pancakes. How about that?”

My sister and I were sitting at our small square solid-wood dining table covered with a sunflower tablecloth. My mom always made our house look like one of Stephen Darbishire’s summer paintings. We had color sprinkled in each room: handmade pillows, embroidered pictures, and lacy doilies on every surface.

I spilled my tea, dotted the space around my teacup with sugar, and put the cuff of my shirt in jam with no reproachful comments from neither my mom nor my sister. The green tea with ginger, lemon, and honey was my mother’s masterpiece. Accompanied by hot pancakes, straight from the pan, it was the greatest luxury of my childhood. I needed to possess a remarkable skill to finish the previous round and soft delicacy in time to stretch my hand for a new hot one before my sister did. It was a fun little competition. Even nowadays we play this game mostly to amuse each other and to make our mom laugh heartily.

My mother knew the power of unconditional love as a parent and chose to show it in three main ways. We can use these in our parenting too:

Choose happy moments to outline life.

To an outsider’s scrupulous eye, it might have been a sad life of many losses, but she decided otherwise. We lost our father when I was three years old, and my mom was only twenty-eight. We were her salvation. Her nature was overly sensitive to every little prick in our humble family life. She shaped our delicate souls with a dominant spirit of unconditional love, and it showed us the path to happiness.

Allow them to experiment and explore.

We attain knowledge by trial and failure, touch, and pain. My mom knew that it was necessary to have something to regret about. There is no freedom in a house in constant order with kids in a state of never broken obedience. Wild tunes should have their place in every family symphony.

The world around us is alive, ruddy, and satisfying only if we are allowed to make mistakes without fear. Being a living embodiment of love, trust, and understanding, she always thought about the consoling things to say when she saw the sparks of tears in our eyes.

Make every moment special.

What to use as a measuring scale when you define life is solely a personal choice. There is a multitude of feelings, countless moments, numerous meetings, hopefully, plentiful impressions — everything has its own emotional shade. The good news is we can choose the colors to paint our life.

We are all composed of the fragments of our various experiences. Being a parent myself, I know it is in my power to make most of these personality-building-moments bright, colorful, and happy for my children.

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…