Your road to happiness
Hello dear followers.
The activity on this blog has been absent for a while, as you know, our “Golf around the Globe” was interrupted by Miss Corona at the end of March.
After 63 days in lock down in South Africa, we landed in Copenhagen on May 29th. Now today, June 16th, we have spent 18 days in a small cozy Bnb out in the countryside south of Aarhus. It feels a bit like being home.
In the last 14 days we – especially me – have played a lot of golf. I have resumed my place on our super veteran team. We have played 2 division matches. Has won one, lost the other. Neither success nor failure – just not good enough.
I have been to the office a few times. Mostly to see how it goes with my pension. It’s fine.
Miss Corona has not been so tough on my company’s revenue and earnings. Decline, of course, but not life-threatening. We are actually doing just fine. So now Eza and I are waiting to resume our trip.
But it’s a little depressing. Everything has to be re-planned. Can we just resume the itinerary where it was interrupted or should we start planning all over again? Everything hangs a bit in the air. However, one thing is certain; we will start again.
Which made me think of something I wrote a few years ago in a small booklet about motivation. The title is: Making dreams come true – 7 provokers of thoughts on your way.
It consists of 7 small stories. In the introduction I wrote: “If you don’t have any dreams today, what is then the purpose of tomorrow?”
This morning, in the midst of a not so optimistic mood, I found the booklet. Maybe there was something that could lift the mood and optimism.
One of the 7 provokers is the following one. If you are just a bit affected with a corona slump, reading this may help your mood – too!
Here it is.
“About being motivated
Where does the motivation come from?
According to Maslow’s pyramid of needs it comes from: the need for food and sex, housing and keeping warm, family and friendship, self-esteem and respect and finally the need for realizing your physical, creative and intellectual potentials. In that order.
Some needs are more constant, others more situational.
What motivates you one day is not necessarily what motivates you the next day. Some motives return, others disappear completely from your life. And sometimes you need to let go of your EGO, to realize your most valuable motivation.
But one need that never disappears is your quest for happiness.
Maybe you only find it in and between. Maybe what you think will make you happy one day is not the same thing that will make you happy the next day.
Maybe your pursuit of happiness is not the goal at all, but the means to keep you going, to live and survive all the hardships that life exposes you to.
There are two things that you certainly have with you from birth – that which make humanity survive: the survival instinct and the mating instinct.
And when you still have to survive and mate, you might as well do it as happily as possible.
It is in the expectation that you will succeed with something that you find the motivation.
The prospect of how wonderful it will be when you have graduated, have found your soul mate, your new home, your dream job, the idea of how cool your holiday will be, the prospect on being selected to the first team, become number one in your club, European or a world champion.
Anything. It is the expectation that you will be successful that keeps you going.
And sometimes, when you have finally found your happiness, when you have succeeded, have realized your goal, happiness slips out of your hands, slowly seeps out of your mind. But then there is always something else that will make you happy. Isn’t there?
Happiness is like a wheel of happiness. It goes round and round!
Think about it. This is where it starts.”
