I know.
It sounds like something printed on a mug by someone who has never encountered a problem.
You have to feel good to feel good.
Thank you, Skye. Groundbreaking.
But stay with me, because it actually is.
I spent a lot of my life doing the opposite.
Like most of us, I had a perfectly sensible arrangement with life:
I’ll feel good when.
When this happens.
When that works out.
When I get the thing.
When somebody behaves differently.
When I understand.
When I achieve.
When I know.
When the circumstances finally give me sufficient reason to feel how I want to feel.
Then I’ll feel good.
Except there was always another when.
I remember hearing the idea of fighting for peace via Sia’s dulcet tones, and something about it suddenly sounded absurd to me.
Fighting.
For peace.
At some point, if what you actually want is peace, fighting has to stop being the method.
That doesn’t mean fighting was always wrong.
There are times when fighting feels powerful.
Necessary.
Alive.
It can be an enormous movement from feeling helpless.
But eventually you can reach a point where you realise:
I don’t want to fight anymore.
Not because someone told you fighting was bad.
Not because you’ve successfully disciplined yourself into being more enlightened.
It just doesn’t give you what it used to.
What you want now is the peace.
And suddenly you realise- you don’t fight for peace, peace can only be experienced when you stop fighting.
And that’s when this strange little circular sentence starts making sense.
If I want to feel peaceful, at some point I have to experience peace.
If I want to feel happy, at some point I have to experience happiness.
If I want to feel good…
well.
You see the problem.
We keep trying to use circumstances as the delivery service.
Hello, I’d like one happiness please. I’ll take it once the relationship, money, body, career and children are all behaving appropriately.
There may be quite a wait.
And of course circumstances matter.
Things happen.
We want things.
We make changes.
We leave things that aren’t right and create things we prefer.
This isn’t about sitting in a burning building feeling delighted about the curtains.
It’s about recognising that the feeling itself can’t ultimately be outsourced.
Nothing else can feel it for you.
So yes.
It’s simple.
Annoyingly so.
But perhaps the complication has always been: we keep looking for the feeling to start somewhere outside ourselves.
You have to feel good to feel good.
Oh.
This is what I’ve been trying to get to. And it was always in me.