ינהאַלט
שריט 69: "דו זאלסט נישט פאַרלירן האָפענונג: אפילו די לאָנגעסט נאַכט איז דיפיטיד דורך פאַרטאָג"
די 88 רינגס פון צופרידן מענטשן
In this chapter of “The 88 Steps of Happy People” I encourage you never to lose hope
During one of the years that I lived in Virginia, in the USA (in total I spent almost a decade residing in that country), in my second year of my degree I had a singing teacher with whom I learned many things. And not only related to singing. Of all those things, I’m going to keep two. One that has to do with learning, and I will tell that lesson in the next Step, and another that has to do with how to deal with hard periods, and I will talk about it in this one.
Katrina, that was her name, had just come to my university as a professor at the פיייקייַט פון מוזיק. From almost the first moment he found himself unhappy, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not find his place in that educational institution, neither professionally nor socially. He couldn’t understand why he was having such a bad time, and he ended up spending most of his time trying to find an explanation.
Every day he spoke to his biggest confidant, his brother, and always with the same question in mind: “Why is this happening to me and how can I stop it?” This question was consuming her, and all her brother’s advice was of little use. She was mired in misery, and her misery was only growing. He had entered free fall. Tired of seeing her suffer, one day, her brother exploded:
—Stop torturing yourself! Stop looking for the explanation. YOU’RE JUST HAVING A BAD YEAR! And everyone is entitled to having a bad year. If you keep on desperately looking for the cause as a remedy to what’s happening to you, then the remedy is going to be more costly than the problem itself. Recognize that it is a bad year and… ACCEPT IT!
[—Stop torturing yourself! Stop looking for explanations. YOU’RE HAVING A BAD YEAR! And everyone has the right to have a bad year. If you continue to desperately seek the cause as a remedy for what is happening to you, then the remedy will do you more harm than the problem. Acknowledge that it is a bad year and… ACCEPT IT!]
That paragraph changed his life.
He did not realize that he was suffering more from the despair of not finding the cause of the problem than from the problem itself. From the moment he accepted the problem, something magical happened. And it is that … the problem lost its force.
Mere acceptance was the beginning of the end of the problem. If you are going through a difficult period, understand that the greatest damage does not come from period difficulty, but that you do not accept it. If you are aware of this fact and from that moment you work on recognizing the problem and accepting the period, it will be like extracting the venom of a snake. The snake is still there, but it is no longer scary.
Surely in your case it is not even a year, but a month, a week or even a day. The important thing is not its duration. It’s your attitude.
@מלאך
# 88 סטעפּספּעאָפּלע צופרידן