Secret to Life: Don't Starve Yourself

Seeking the secret to a happy life sometimes drains us and starves our souls of true happiness. Are you able to define where dreams and delusion's are fed and true happiness is starved?

“When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul” Oscar Wilde ~ De Profundis

Read this excerpt from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, read it twice or multiple times and let it sink in. We taste pleasure of our delusion and dreams that we ultimately starve our soul...

Are you starving your soul?

I was continuing my research for Love Part 2 by reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and came across an excerpt that made me stop and think.I mean truly think about the secret to life. Yes, we all want the secret to life, secret to happiness and love. But we get so lost on our idealisms of what that secret is we overlook the reality of happiness, ultimately starving our souls. So, what is the secret/ You want that answer…well don’t we all. Secret is…we create our own secret. We develop what makes us happy, my secret is completely different from yours. My dreams, goals and desires are totally different. So sorry to fill you in on this but the secret is YOU.

Yea wasn’t as fluffy and poetic as you thought. I have been struggling with this be happy thing and living life to its fullest. In the last year I faced a huge breakup and moved three hours away to a place I know no one except my daughters. I love the scenery up here, the people are an acquired taste, but not bad. I thought moving would give me a change to start fresh and live this happy go lucky life. Well, another bubble buster, you can’t start over if you are still carrying yesterday’s luggage. So like Oscar Wilde’s excerpt, if you imagine yourself being a honeybee, you find this amazing honeycomb and it’s the best one you’ve ever found. So, you eat, gorge and wallow in its perfection. But then you realize the queen bee is not the one you want but you never realized it because you were so enticed by the sweetness of the honey. OK, I know nothing about bees, but it would suck to work hard for a queen bee that doesn’t give you self-fulfillment. Because only you can give that to yourself.

When you seek happiness you find moments, items and people that give you immediate gratification and satisfaction. Then those moments wear off and you are left with a bitter carcass, bitter because you resent eh one thing you thought brought you happiness. You were so focused on the immediate gratification that you never look beyond to ask will this be enough in a week, a month or years? We chose something that made us feel good in that moment. Like, when you go somewhere new for the first time, it is fun, exciting and beautiful. But after time it becomes mundane, boring, typical and we lose that excitement. That is starving your soul, because all you cared about was feeding your immediate need. Life is a balancing act of satisfying your immediate needs and desires while also feeding your soul for true happiness. We all love those vacations with the excitement and carefree attitudes, but if we lied that everyday it wouldn’t be a vacation anymore, it would be everyday life.

When we look at life as a journey, we have moments that make us smile, lessons that make us think and memories that don’t let us forget. We need to balance those and create dreams that feed us not just satisfy us. Because when we feed our souls, we create a happiness that no quick decision or moment can rattle. Life is never going to be sunshine and rainbows every day, there will be mistakes, pain, suffering but those are all temporary. When you feed your soul with things that truly make you feel all warm, fuzzy and complete it helps balance and absorb those moments that aren’t so glorious.

So, stop trying to find the secret to a happy life and feed your soul with feel good happiness that will last for years. I cannot tell you what it is that will satisfy your soul and feed it continuously but I can say that if you focus on those core ideas you will create a foundation that cant be broken with heartbreak, pain or suffering