Life is a Journey, Why Not Share it?

I was recently having a discussion with my friend Julia about her relationship woes. Julia is a worrier. She worries about things that most young women worry about. Things like, should I worry if my boyfriend shows professional interest in another woman, what should I do if he still hasn’t said I love you yet, and generally, what if I am not good enough for him?

As I had mentioned, these are pretty common worries, but they shouldn’t be. No person’s purpose in life is simply to be good enough for any other one individual. Indeed, we all have the right and desire to seek our own inner happiness. My advice to Julia was simply to be more confident and recognize that she is a great person just the way she is. Julia is a very intelligent, and sweet woman, but she lacks the self confidence to recognize that.

There are two basic types of people when it comes to dealing with fault and problems, internalizers and externalizers. An externalizer is a person who always seeks fault outside of themselves. They are the people who ask “what is wrong with him?” when something goes wrong. They seek faults in their surroundings in an effort to explain their own failures. An internalizer seeks fault within. So when something goes wrong they ask “what is wrong with me?” Generally, internalizers usually wind up being much more successful. The reason is simple, we can only control ourselves, we cannot always control our surroundings.

That being said, I do not mean to say that we need always make changes to ourselves either. If we are already generally happy people, but then we find our lack of aptitude at playing basketball to be a source of much frustration, then perhaps we need to look inside ourselves and recognize that we are not very good at basketball, nor does it make us happy, so we should find a new hobby.

To get back on track, I feel that what we should be focusing on ultimately, is the pursuit of happiness. We will never find our own happiness by internalizing too much. We must learn and accept our own limitations, and accept when we are reaching them. If this leads to the end of a relationship, that is ok. We should be happy for the time that we had together, and we should move on. We are not our relationships. And we can only truly find ourselves happy once we’ve let go of unhealthy attachment. The Buddha only taught two things, suffering and the end of suffering. The end of suffering begins with freedom from attachment.