how to stop trying to think yourself into happiness and actually arrive there
Jonathan Safran Foer once said that he’d thought himself out of happiness a million times, but never once into it. But maybe that’s the very thing that we’re all doing wrong: we keep trying to think ourselves into happiness without ever accepting that loneliness and self-loathing and the feeling of wanting to jump off a building are all just part of human nature. We’re trying too hard to project ourselves into an emotion that we could reach much more easily through action, as if by thinking good thoughts we’d automatically never think any more bad ones.
It’s like when you were younger and you lived next to your best friend and you always tried to figure out a way to get from your house to theirs in the middle of the night. You could imagine yourself crossing a little rope bridge attaching your window to theirs a thousand times, but you were never once able to physically make it happen because you never gathered the rope and the wood and the hammer and nails that would have made it all possible.
It’s the same way with happiness. Happiness is something that cannot be imagined into reality; it’s something that has to be physically brought into reality. So stop moping about in bed all day, lying underneath the warm covers and staring at the ceiling counting every single crack in the plaster. Instead, get out of bed. Stop hitting the snooze button. Put on a comfy sweater and some jeans and hiking boots.
Go make yourself a nice hearty breakfast, eggs and bacon and French toast or something like that with a strong glass of orange juice, and eat every last bite, wipe the plate clean with your fingers if you have to. Leave no crumb untouched. Even if you have to force the food down, do it anyway, because filling yourself with something as simple as basic nutrients is better than constantly stuffing yourself with self-loathing, plus you get the added bonus of taste too.
Now go out for a hike. Leave your cellphone at home, your laptop, your iPod, your headphones, everything. Don’t bring anything but yourself and a bottle of water and maybe a few snacks or too. Find the tallest hill or cliff or trail you can walk and go for it.
Pump your arms and legs and push onward; tell yourself encouraging things as soon as you start to huff and puff. I don’t want to get all sappy but this really is a metaphor for climbing out of your unhappiness, and if you can’t climb up a hill, then you’ll never be able to climb out of all those toxic feelings either.
Once you get to the top, stand there and admire the view. Don’t say anything, don’t sit down, just stand there and look out over the horizon and look at the colors of the sky and the tops of the trees and watch the birds flying in the distance. Look at all the wide open space around you and feel how small you are in the midst of all those great things, how tiny you are in comparison.
Your problems can be that tiny too.
Now, close your eyes and step as close to the edge of this cliff as you can get. Get so close you can feel the wind tug gently at your sweater and knock you around a bit; stand there and taste the salty air with your tongue and keep your eyes closed, just think about how close you’ve been to happiness sometimes, how close you were to falling off the edge of unhappiness and into happiness, but you were never willing to make the necessary changes to get yourself where you wanted to go.
Once you understand that, turn around and go back home the way you came. Because sometimes in life you’re gonna have to retrace your steps and follow the old path to get back to a new one.
When you get home, do some spring-cleaning. Throw out all the sad CDs and the old love letters from exes and the moldy cartons of Chinese food from when you were too depressed to cook yourself dinner. Open the curtains, make the bed so you’re not tempted to get into it again, fill the trash bags with stuff upon stuff upon stuff.
Get rid of your ratty old hoodies and comfort clothes, the candy wrappers from the chocolate you used as a coping mechanism, the boring law books. Delete all the text messages from friends and ex-boyfriends and girlfriends that made you feel worthless and put-down and unloved and less than human.
Once you’ve thrown it all away, stand back and look at the trash bags. Look at everything that was holding you down. Look at the rows upon rows of stuff and look at those bags like they’re all the unhappiness you carried around on your back like a wooden cross or a really heavy backpack.
Now pick them all up, go outside to the Dumpster, and slam those fuckers in there.
Shut the lid.
Breathe the open air and look up at the sun.
Maybe you were never able to think yourself into happiness, but you walked and talked and hiked and cleaned your way to it, and if that’s not something to be proud of, then I don’t know what is.
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