There are days when nothing is going right and as far as I'm concerned I should just go back to bed and hide out there until the situation improves. Then someone smiles at me or I find some money laying on the ground or something like that and my whole day turns around. I started thinking back and realized that all of the best things I had experienced were little things. Things like making friends with a cat, or bumping into someone who's happy to see me. It made me remember a quote by Kurt Vonnegut:
"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." And it's true. Sometimes you just have to look around to find something good about the world. Like the first crocuses of spring, or a really good meal. Hell, as you get older you start appreciating a really good bowel movement. Maybe part of that is that you begin to realize that there are no guarantees in life so you have to be grateful both for what you have and what you get. Not everybody gets to make it through life in one piece. Not everybody is healthy. Shit happens. Sometimes it's the little things that wear you down over time, because in misery, as in joy, it's the little things that do it. They have a way of piling up. The little things that are good are usually things you have to look out for. The little things that are bad tend to gang up on you. You still have to look out for them, but in a different sense than the good ones.
That said, a lot of life is about what you make of the little things. Obviously there's the "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" approach, but there is also a tendency in people to catastrophize every little thing to the point where all they focus on are the bits of sand in the clam chowder that is life. I think it's important to learn to deal with frustration and disappointment, because there are a lot of both of them in life no matter what you do, and if you don't learn to roll with it you're just going to make life that much harder for yourself. Life is practically made of frustration and disappointment after all. Perhaps that's to make us appreciate it when things go right for a change. Or not. There are people who take every frustration as a sign that the world is out to get them and everything is shit. It has everything to do with your attitude toward life. The world doesn't owe us shit. That's precisely why we have to appreciate what happiness we get. Rejecting happiness because you don't think it's big enough is just going to mean that you miss out on what happiness there is to be had. There are no guarantees that you're going to win the lottery and live happily ever after. The idea that we should be ecstatically happy all of the time is just creating an unrealistic expectation. Besides, we'd never appreciate the good things if there weren't any bad to provide contrast.
That's not to say that I think there's some cosmic plan and that anything happens for a reason. It doesn't. The universe is indifferent. It is neither for nor against us. What happiness there is we have to create for ourselves or go out and find it. There is no meaning to the universe except what we ourselves give it. A lot of our reality is completely subjective, but that's not such a bad thing. What it means is that we get to create our own reality. We don't control what happens to us, but we get to decide how we take things and how we deal with them. It's a lot of responsibility, and I suppose on some level that I can understand how people would be afraid of that. If you have to take responsibility for how happy you are, it means that it's your own fault if you're unhappy. Most people are much more comfortable making the world responsible for their happiness. The irony of it is that this is precisely what keeps them unhappy. They sabotage themselves by having an outward locus of control. If you make everybody else and the world at large responsible for your happiness, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. It's actually one of the few examples of a guarantee in life, because if you do that, you're guaranteed to be unhappy with the results. One of those little paradoxes. As I said, it's the little things that make the biggest difference in life.
What matters are the relationships we build. The friendships. Love given and returned. Someone who's happy to see you. You can have everything else, but if you haven't got anyone who's happy to see you, you haven't got anything. When you do have it, it can make the world feel a lot friendlier. It takes work though, because it means letting someone in and sharing the experience of life with them. It's scary, but it's worth it. You can't be friends with everyone, but everyone should have at least one friend.
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