Happiness = Perspective

At work each week, we close the office and we have Staff Meeting for an hour. This week, my boss took the opportunity to show us a TED talk, and I think that this is one of my favorites. You can find it here.

The speaker talked about happiness and how our happiness depends on the lens we view the world with. Our happiness depends on where our focus is. Perspective makes a huge difference. I love that he talked about applying to Harvard basically on a dare. He didn't think he would get in; college wasn't a viable option for him. And yet he did get in. When he started attending, he was just happy to be there, excited to be in such an incredible environment - even though everyone in the class was smarter than him. How many of us are like that? So happy to be where we are, experiencing what we are experiencing, despite the fantastic accomplishments surrounding us? I'm not a statistician, but I would think that those numbers are very few. So often I catch myself thinking about what everyone else around me has done, what great things they have achieved and where they are going with their lives, that I fail to notice what I have accomplished, what I am doing with my life. 

I find that I am especially this way with my dancing. Of course, I get excited when we do well at competitions ("excited" being relative - I usually don't display very much enthusiasm), but I frequently (but it is important to note not always!) find myself focusing on what more we have to do, what went wrong, getting frustrated with myself and my partner (sorry Robbie!). My mom will occasionally post our results on instagram, and everyone is always excited about how we do, regardless of how we actually do or how many couples actually competed. They see a first place as a first place, no matter the circumstances surrounding it. 

I was humbled when I made that realization on Thursday. Why don't I take the time to appreciate my successes and adopt a new perspective so that I actually see them as successes?  Another example I will give goes back to the Harvard example. My boss asked us on Thursday if we had the same attitude toward BYU as the speaker had about Harvard. It is so easy for us to view achievements like that as something we simply expect of ourselves. During my freshman year of college, I would remind myself that I had achieved a life-long goal - to go to college at BYU. I was living my dream, and I still am! Another goal I had was to dance for BYU, and here I am, dancing on the back-up touring team. I didn't make tour team this year, and I was very disappointed. Let's change that perspective for a moment. There are 5 performing teams within the ballroom company at BYU. Each team has roughly 32 members. Many people don't even make the 1:00 team, let alone the back-up team. How blessed am I?! 

It is so easy to get caught up in the "lives" of everyone else, or rather, the lives that we see those around us living. We start to judge our own lives based on what we see them doing, trying to achieve what they have, thinking less of ourselves because we don't. The truth is though, we are all different. I have different talents and abilities than my friends and teammates and roommates and everyone else. I have a different perspective and different thought process, because I am different and I have experienced different things. What I do does not have to be based on what someone I look up to and aspire to be like does. I am not any less of a person because I am not doing what they are doing, achieving what they are achieving. I have my own thoughts, my own personality, my own abilities, my own gifts, my own experiences. 

"Comparison is the thief of joy." 

I am not meant to be like anyone else but Christ, and even then I will be different, because that's how I was made. I was made to be different, to see things differently. While speaking to Relief Society sisters in October 1990, Sister Elaine L. Jack said,

 "Ask yourself, are the comparisons you may make of yourself and others based on the model of the Savior’s life, or do they come from trying to fit your life into the pattern of others’ lives?

Sometimes comparisons creep up on us. We sit in Relief Society surrounded by our neighbors and friends, all of whom seem to raise the best children, to teach the most profound lessons, and to possess the greatest spirituality. It can feel so discouraging.

Some of you may say, 'I’m just average. There’s nothing special about me or my life.' And yet what is manifested plainly to me is that you are extraordinary, you whose average day is lived in accordance with our Heavenly Father’s laws."

This post hasn't been as organized as I would have liked it to be, nor have I been able to share everything that I had wanted to without throwing it into even more disarray. I hope to come back to this in the near future because I have a few more thoughts to share. What I have shared is the general idea of what I have been thinking about this past week. We are all different, therefore our successes are all different. Find joy in your successes, no matter how someone else might do them. Do things that you want to do because you want to do them, not because it is what someone that you look up to would do. Be your own person, find your own happiness.

 Happy Sunday!