Tan Chade-Meng, the author of Search Inside Yourself, describes pleasure as a state of being high on happiness with a short duration, passion as a state of flow/excellent performance with a medium duration, and higher purpose as a state of “being part of something bigger than yourself”. How can we apply these different forms of happiness to our lives? Tan suggests instead of being short sighted and focusing excelling as fast as possible, we should look at the big picture for something that has personal meaning to us. Once we find that higher purpose, the rest will follow.
This might sound childish because I’m sure it is something everyone was told when they were growing up but one of my most important values I hold at the core is having manners. It takes absolutely no skill at all to smile at someone, say good morning, hold the door open for the elderly, look a person in the eyes when you shake there hand, you get what I mean. Just treat people the way you would want to be treated, this is primary school easy! This world would be a different place if we all did that.
The meditation exercise was interesting to me as it made me ask some questions I haven’t really asked myself before. Where is my place in this world? I love the idea of the meditation exercises asking me best case scenario, where do I see myself in five years? Often I personally find myself looking always in the long term which isn’t really what I want to be doing, I want to enjoy the present! I guess the only difference between my normal look to the future and this exercise is that this exercise made me think if my most optimistic expectations were exceeded, where would I be and what would I be doing? In terms of resilience ideas, I really liked the metaphor from Matthieu Ricard “Think of happiness as a deep ocean. The surface may be choppy, but the bottom is always calm.”. This spoke to me a lot as there are always going to be set backs and ups and downs in this life but if we can gain that inner calm/peace, we can bounce back and always be resilient.