This morning I woke up both frustrated and angry, and not a new issue to either of those regards. I have complained multiple times on how so much of our lives depend on the whims of others, and you can make ten thousand requests to people but that is all you can do.
To deal with this I took my morning coffee on a walk, and remembered that happiness is an intrinsic value. It lives inside of us. Yet so much of our lives is extrinsic. Value we get from outside ourselves, and we are only fooling ourselves if we think how people perceive us, desire us, act towards us, and so on don’t matter. Our intrinsic value is suppressed by our extrinsic value.
Think about the phrase money can’t buy happiness. It can’t. Money can buy things, opportunity, experiences, relief, but it cannot ultimately change how we feel about ourselves or how we value or lives. Having more money removes volatility from our lives. It increases our intrinsic worth, not by directly increasing it, but by removing that which keeps it suppressed.
Time is also a factor in our lives. As we head towards our expiry that aspect of our extrinsic value is removed. Every day we live is one day less we have to live. At the end of summer I often think about how many few good summers I have left. At Kings Dominion not too long ago I noticed that I was the oldest person in line by a good margin, and even when I wasn’t the other person my age or older was with other people.
I live a very internal life to begin with. The nature of my work is isolating, and I have never been a person good at making friends. Dwelling on this too long also suppresses my intrinsic value and makes it harder to get to my point.
As human being we depend on others. Having more happiness around us, as well as within us, will increase our value. It is simply that we can’t control what is outside ourselves, and that gets us to the real epiphany of my walk this morning.
It isn’t that I shouldn’t be annoyed or angry at a simple request that has been ignored for five years. It is that my focus shouldn’t be on that. It should be doing one small thing every day to increase my own intrinsic value, and it can be something as small as taking a morning walk or writing this journal, because over time all those small things will add up and when it comes to my expiry date I will expire with great intrinsic value.
David Huzzard Writes 