This is going to be Hard!!
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: columbus
Posts: 28
Well, this will be my FIRST Football Saturday completely sober!!! And depending on how my Buckeyes play will determine my happiness...LOL I feel great and have a feeling I will ALL day long!!!!! Thank you so very much!!!!!
EndGame
Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: New York, NY
Posts: 4,677
Happiness rarely describes a lifetime; we only experience it for moments at a time. A lifetime of happiness is a lie. I drank in order to avoid the profound truth that life is hard, that it didn't offer me the delusional happiness I craved all on its own. Life with a capital 'L' doesn't care about my misery; it only provides a place in which to live it. Why do so many of us turn yet again to the drink when the going gets tough?
It's extremely difficult to imagine that dealing with adversity is a better substitute for the happiness that we seek, but the benefits are not at all delusional, and give us something that happiness never could. I never believed this to be the case, and I did everything in my power to disprove such a reality. It was too hard to swallow, and meant nothing to me in my alcoholic state. Dealing with adversity is for suckers and people who just don't know any better.
I grew up becoming accustomed to doing things because I believed that they would make me happy in the doing, because they were easy, or because there was always something obvious that was in it for me. I eschewed challenges that I didn't believe I was able to master because I didn't want the humiliation that I imagined came with failing to be the best. I chose security over living a fuller life. Now, I do things both easy and difficult because I'm happy to do them and not because I imagine that it will make me happy to do them. I'm of a mind that making and acting on the harder choice is its own reward.
For me, if I learn nothing from my suffering, then all that pain and misery was simply meaningless. It signified nothing and only confirmed my belief that life is harsh and unforgiving, and that that was the best I could do. Through my suffering, I came to a much better place in my life. I've learned that doing what is hard is invariably the better path. Life wasn't meant to be easy, and my forcing the issue only left me with mounting losses, a life that remained unlived.
JFK, in my mind one of the greatest statesmen of my lifetime, once gave a speech about going to the moon. (I'm both a formal and informal student of American, European and Russian History in the Twentieth Century.) He had a knack for making the impossible seem possible. The speech is both inspired and inspiring and, though I was a very young child at the time, I remember the speech, though my memory may very well have been as an older child when the speech was rebroadcast following his untimely death.
There's a full version:
JFK - We choose to go to the Moon, full length - YouTube
A shorter version:
John F. Kennedy "We Choose To Go The Moon" Speech Rice University - September 12, 1961 (Part-1) - YouTube
And a snippet:
We Choose to go to the Moon - YouTube
It's extremely difficult to imagine that dealing with adversity is a better substitute for the happiness that we seek, but the benefits are not at all delusional, and give us something that happiness never could. I never believed this to be the case, and I did everything in my power to disprove such a reality. It was too hard to swallow, and meant nothing to me in my alcoholic state. Dealing with adversity is for suckers and people who just don't know any better.
I grew up becoming accustomed to doing things because I believed that they would make me happy in the doing, because they were easy, or because there was always something obvious that was in it for me. I eschewed challenges that I didn't believe I was able to master because I didn't want the humiliation that I imagined came with failing to be the best. I chose security over living a fuller life. Now, I do things both easy and difficult because I'm happy to do them and not because I imagine that it will make me happy to do them. I'm of a mind that making and acting on the harder choice is its own reward.
For me, if I learn nothing from my suffering, then all that pain and misery was simply meaningless. It signified nothing and only confirmed my belief that life is harsh and unforgiving, and that that was the best I could do. Through my suffering, I came to a much better place in my life. I've learned that doing what is hard is invariably the better path. Life wasn't meant to be easy, and my forcing the issue only left me with mounting losses, a life that remained unlived.
JFK, in my mind one of the greatest statesmen of my lifetime, once gave a speech about going to the moon. (I'm both a formal and informal student of American, European and Russian History in the Twentieth Century.) He had a knack for making the impossible seem possible. The speech is both inspired and inspiring and, though I was a very young child at the time, I remember the speech, though my memory may very well have been as an older child when the speech was rebroadcast following his untimely death.
There's a full version:
JFK - We choose to go to the Moon, full length - YouTube
A shorter version:
John F. Kennedy "We Choose To Go The Moon" Speech Rice University - September 12, 1961 (Part-1) - YouTube
And a snippet:
We Choose to go to the Moon - YouTube
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