You want to be happy, but there is no guarantee, life is a timed adventure, and you do not know what you will gain tomorrow, nor in which land you will die. You want to be successful, but before success there is effort, patience and perhaps pain, and even if you reach it, it may come late after attachment, and may not lead to the result you have always dreamed of. You want to be rich, but there is no guaranteed path, if it is academic excellence, how many geniuses are still forgotten, suffering from the hardship of life and the bitterness of injustice and frustration, and if the path is a deviation, you may be exposed to the consequences of legal punishment and a lack of a sense of security. You want to be healthy, even if the world has blessed you with genetic traits and a healthy living environment, how many have lost their lives in epidemics and accidents! You want glory, fame and power! How do you know the price of struggles, risks and tension, you live through until you reach it, and even keep it if you can. You want to enjoy health, money, success, glory, power and fame together, so even if you are unique and lucky, how can you know what life's vicissitudes and fate's blows have in store for you! If you live desiring, insisting, diligent, betting on your world, you do not see an alternative to the goal, because attachment is humiliation without a guarantee. If you live anxiously waiting for the future, you have not enjoyed your present. If you live certain of achieving your goal, you risk moving away from reality and falling into the trap of frustration and illness. If you do not succeed, and if you live hopelessly distracted, you have wasted your life in vain, and your life has become without a goal except for temporary pleasures, some of which are harmful to yourself and others.
So what is the solution! You can think and plan, strive and pursue your goals, and change them, or change your style and effort, if you face obstacles, but without imposing conditions on a life that you did not create, and do not control its destinies and risks, and that is by respecting fate and destiny, and that no matter how hard you try, you may not realize what fate hides, nor what awaits you in every choice, whether you take it or avoid it, because life needs a degree of submission and a degree of grateful faith in divine care, protecting you from calamities, and requires a degree of determination; to transform the problem into an opportunity for development through constructive pain, learning and achievement, because the Lord of goodness only brings goodness, and faith is a motive for achievement, and gratitude brings more goodness. But this immersion and perhaps self-centeredness and the conflict between what you want and what is raging inside you may dissipate energy in tensions and frustrations, undermine physical and psychological health, and affect habits and human relationships, even if you are diligent and grateful, and believe in divine providence and destiny.
So how do you make your worldly life enjoyable despite its dangers and pains! If you contemplate those choices, you will find that the source of their pain is that you bet everything on them, entered a battle without guarantee, and dedicated your life to them, so you forgot to live, took the world on your heart, so its burden became heavy on it, because you lived within your goals, desires, tensions and pains.
So what if you did your best, and selflessly came out of the shell of the self, by living outside of it, living purely, satisfied and reassured through others, even through beings, through the wisdom of life with the luxury of sense and depth of perception, others joy increases your joy, and sharing pain increases your wisdom and humanity,
If you did that, then you did not burn your ships betting on an uncertain victory in the battle of life, and if you did that, feelings of tolerance and peace, meanings of love and containment, and feelings of respect and benevolence would grow within you. And that would lead to a happier and more generous life, and deeper asceticism and purity. If you did that, others would live inside you, even if you were alone, and you would respect their choices, maturity and mission in this life without expecting anything in return, and taking into account that what you are in is not only the result of your effort and abilities, but also the result of living conditions and life opportunities, and perhaps if you were in their place with their abilities, upbringing and circumstances, you would do the same.
If you did that, there would be no place for hatred in your heart, for God's world is full of good and evil, and if people did not push each other, the earth would be corrupted, so the interaction with its good and evil is an incentive for development and work, for learning and production. We are all from God's creation.
Living selflessly if you can, is the enjoyment of life and its art, or rather the beginning of life as it should be. Living outside of oneself enriches life, matures the soul, and brings to it honest, loving relationships and the ability to produce creativity.
Living outside of oneself resolves the contradiction between goals and happiness. If the goal does not necessarily achieve happiness, then happiness is not the goal, but rather the path, a path we take with love and passion, love as a motive and method and as a goal that increases it, and makes the timed journey of life a walk for the soul, and a balm for the lives of others.
But living outside of oneself requires a renewed will to know how to manage your energy, and to improve the direction of your emotional attention, to be the active party in life and not the acted upon, the active party who chooses what he thinks about, and always feels it positively, without paying attention to the negatives and tensions that steal energy and undermine good work and dealing, and weaken the ability to learn and psychological compatibility,
Living outside of oneself is the easy and impossible, and it is the difficult goal, but it is worth it, and what is not taken in its entirety should not be left in its entirety, so if you want to live with the art of life, there is no alternative to continuing to try, continuing to learn, and continuing to hope.
Dr. Hadi Eltonsi
Former Ambassador
And Medical Doctor