Don't Worry - Be Happy

This week in the Netherlands was marked by a number of bizarre events – large scale – such as the attempted attack on our Royal Family during what is supposed to be the biggest celebration of the year – to small scale – a rooster that is keeping a family member awake every single night as it crows at the weirdest times. It’s driving her nuts, but even polite requests to the owners have not resulted in them taking any action at all, they simply refuse.

In between these two extremes I can name at least another 20 incidences that could get a person thoroughly depressed.
And for a while, I felt depressed indeed. The weather isn’t helping, still somber and rainy instead of nice spring sunshine. But then I thought about all the good things in my life and I decided that I really have an obligation to myself to rise above it all and simply enjoy every moment.

I see this a lot with people these days – there is such an influx of rapid events that can turn your emotions from high to low and back again in a few hours – that hardly a day passes when you feel completely happy with life. Often, you have “dips”, things don’t work, technology throws you an incomprehensible error that blocks you from all those mega important tasks, the cell phone you just bought has a nasty habit of displaying r’s instead of 3’s, people demand that you do this or that… tons of things get you off-balance. But at the end of the day – it is up to you to decide if you let them get you off balance. As a friend of mine used to say “worry about the things that you can change, don’t worry about the rest”. No words were truer spoken. We can worry, collectively, all we like about the Royal Family being attacked and we take all the precautions that we can – as a state. But it takes only one idiot with a car to blast that sense of security (almost literally) apart. And nothing you can do about it either – so why worry? Is it going to prevent it ever happening again? No. Can I personally do anything about it (bar stopping another idiot if I meet him/her). No. Is it going to make me feel better? Hell no.

I can, however, do something about a family that is too inconsiderate to think about someone else’s health. I can make a difference there, so instead of getting myself down about technology and security and life in the Netherlands…I will now start laying the ground works for a plan to catch this rooster and make sure my family can sleep again. That is energy well spent and will leave us all feeling relieved and happy again…

I am sure you can all find an example, albeit it slightly less weird I hope then my rooster-issue, where you catch yourself worrying about something that you cannot change. So let it go, you can’t control the events… but you can control your emotions. Be Happy, Don’t Worry!

BTW if any of you are any good at catching roosters – please email me.
 

3 Comments

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• Martijn Zijerveld | May 5, 2009 06:38 AM

  #Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you respond to it.
  #” If you don’t succeed in the first attempt, call it version 1.0
  #” If you try, you risk failure; if you don’t you ensure it. “
  
  Well these ones is like a lot!
  Good luck with the rooster!

• Martijn Zijerveld | May 5, 2009 06:39 AM

  #Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you respond to it.
  #” If you don’t succeed in the first attempt, call it version 1.0
  #” If you try, you risk failure; if you don’t you ensure it. “
  
  Well these ones is like a lot!
  Good luck with the rooster!

• Stephanie Kern | May 6, 2009 11:30 AM

  Thank you for the post Marion. I had such a crummy 2008 and I was looking forward to a prosperous 2009 when… life happened. I have been down most of this year, so happy thoughts from grounded people helps. And at least I can say that I am not being tormented by a rooster! Good luck with that. And the sun WILL shine again in Amsterdam.

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