You can have a great deal and still be deeply unhappy. The wider the gap between your reality and the life you pictured, the more it hurts.
How can you have so much and still feel like a deeply unhappy person?
You can have a great career and a great income. You can be good-looking, perfectly healthy, young, charismatic and self-assured.
Your bank balance can have five zeros. You can have a beautiful apartment with a view and a brand-new car straight from the dealership.
Your parents are in good health and your colleagues respect you. Your sense of humour is razor-sharp.
People look at you at the gym because you’re in excellent shape.
Huge numbers of people envy you and think you know how to build a life and that you’re a very happy person.
And yet, coming home and being alone with yourself, you can be a deeply unhappy person who cries into the pillow before falling asleep.
Because despite all those wonderful things in your life, by 35 you had wanted to be a mother (or father) of three, to have a happy relationship, a dog, to live by a lake or a river in your own single-storey house with a fireplace. You wanted a rabbit hutch in the back yard so the kids could play with them while you watched from the window with a cup of hot chocolate.
Instead, every day you sit in traffic on the way to an office, spend eight hours in front of a computer, and come back to a high-rise box where your studio apartment is. Waiting for you at home are some fish in a tank and a gym membership.
Our life doesn’t match what we actually want.
What we’re reaching for on the inside is an image we created ourselves (a family and a house by the water, with a dog). And then there’s reality (a concrete jungle and a successful career). The wider the gap between reality and the way we want to live, the more we suffer.
And it makes no difference at all how many other wonderful things there are in our life. It doesn’t matter how many people envy us or respect us. We give ourselves a failing grade because we know we’d want to be living a completely different life.
That’s where the pain, the apathy and the disappointment come from.
From there we have two options.
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Change the image in our head and lower our expectations and demands of ourselves. In practice, about one person in a hundred manages this.
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Move our current reality closer to the image we want. This means rolling up our sleeves and starting to work on our life — changing the habits and behaviour patterns that get in our way. It’s hard, painstaking daily work, but the reward is very generous: the life we actually want.
When we live in line with our inner image, we feel full, joyful and inspired. We know we’re living our best life and using the potential God gave us.
At my New Lifestyle school, in the courses “The Art of Achieving Goals” and “Self-Discipline”, I go into this topic far more broadly and in far more detail.
So how well does your life match your inner image? Do you feel you’re living your best life?