I’m a very happy person. I like to think of myself as being happy all the time. I take joy from lots of things in life: meeting with friends, having my daily 10,000 step walk, The Waltons, using my favourite knife to cut cheese, updating this blog, making Finger Puppet Show strips, reading books, riding on the bus and more too. Nothing bad happens to me either, which is nice. So you can see why I’d be in a good mood.
Sadly, a good number of my friends don’t seem to be quite so lucky and it’s quite sad. I like to think that a nice blend of politeness, support and an optimistic attitude is enough to make anybody happy, but as it happens many things aren’t so simple and it seems that, for some of my closest friends, there’s nothing I can do to help. They say there comes a point in a person’s life when they realise that they can’t help everybody, and perhaps this is it for me. However, while the thought ‘you can’t help everybody’ is usually followed up with ‘so don’t try to’ I’ve come to a different conclusion: just because you can’t always keep everybody in a permanent state of happiness, there’s no reason not to have that as your goal anyway. Some problems may not easily be solved, but to take that as a sign to not even try is rather distressingly pessimistic. It’s better to take arms against a sea of troubles than to give up swimming altogether.
Sadly, a good number of my friends don’t seem to be quite so lucky and it’s quite sad. I like to think that a nice blend of politeness, support and an optimistic attitude is enough to make anybody happy, but as it happens many things aren’t so simple and it seems that, for some of my closest friends, there’s nothing I can do to help. They say there comes a point in a person’s life when they realise that they can’t help everybody, and perhaps this is it for me. However, while the thought ‘you can’t help everybody’ is usually followed up with ‘so don’t try to’ I’ve come to a different conclusion: just because you can’t always keep everybody in a permanent state of happiness, there’s no reason not to have that as your goal anyway. Some problems may not easily be solved, but to take that as a sign to not even try is rather distressingly pessimistic. It’s better to take arms against a sea of troubles than to give up swimming altogether.
