Truth #3: Loss is an unescapeable suffering

The Buddhists say that life is suffering. Suffering surrounds us, it’s in everything, even in the seemingly happy moments we have we suffer for we know that it will not last. They believe that only through relieving the sufferings of the mind can we truly know life, truth, enlightenment. However, the Buddhists understand that not all suffering is avoidable. We can release our desires of worldly objects, money, and lust. We can heal those around us who are hurting to better alleviate our own eventual suffering through ourselves or even through those we choose not to help. We can even let go of the mind, in some cases the greatest form of suffering, and relinquish our ideas of self: that which traps us in this society. But the Buddhists are wise because they understand that there are some losses that are completely and utterly unavoidable. The suffering of Loss is something we can never escape. Loss is the end of a Joy.

Truth #2: Life == Discovery

The true core of man is defined by discovery which is acquired only through adventure. That sense that there is something more, that we’re settled here discontent in our menial lives, it’s all true. We are trapped in so many ways and when we lose sight of the adventure in life we cease to live. Life is adventure, life is experience, life is the key to a lack of discontent. However it is so incredibly important to truly call one’s own settlements what they are. Have you settled on a wife and child, a 9-5 job, a mortgage and a car payment? Or have you simply settled that you no longer can allow adventure in your life?

Adventure, I believe can come in any form or shape or time. Scientist enjoy the thrill of discovery as they sit in a solitary room looking under microscopes at new and undocumented micro-organisms. Teens and twenty-somethings search for the answers to life through travel, backpacking the world to find themselves when in reality by investigating new and unknown continents they have already found the answer to living. Seniors like Berta find life through sitting on the porch and discovering the beauty of the mountains anew each and every day. Discovery can be directed towards oneself as well, it really doesn’t matter. I should think that the subject of discovery changes through out our lives. Maybe that is life’s what of showing us our destiny.

What’s important to note here is that Change is not the same as Discovery. Change, from what I can discern, is the uncalculated attempt at discovering new life experiences. It’s wreckless and in many instances fruitless because change does not dictate discovery. You can visit every major city in the world in search of yourself or just a new life experience, but without calculation and planning you will suddenly find yourself visiting the same city over and over and over again merely in a different land. To fully discover one must find something new, not by placing oneself in a new situation, but by actively putting oneself there to explore the intricacies of it. For example I think there are two kinds of people, ones who say they’ve been somewhere and others who say what they did there. The difference is that the people who remember what they did really lived that place.

Truth #1: The two sided coin of Happiness

Happiness is in it’s essance either a trap or a legitimate byproduct of following one’s true destiny. In any situation where there is option A or B, where both A and B result in different kinds of releative happiness, one is quite probably a trap.  I do however believe that it is possible to compromise and at least taste the rewards of either while still following one’s destiny.

Paulo Coelio’s character Berta in the extremely incitefull novel “The Devil and Miss Prym” sums this concept up very well. “[People] seek suffering in the most joyous of places because they think they are unworthy of happiness” She describes the constant struggle between being happy and finding happiness. Contentment vs discovery of new pleasures.