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The burden of happiness


In a world full of uncertainties and deceit, friendship becomes what is available to bring sanity. We often find ourselves in situations where there is always a need to make a choice between what is good for our selfish joy or better for our collective happiness. The self is often the one everyone expects to give in for the us.

It is only the mentally empowered and those whose locus of control is within them that will understand the importance of working on the self and not us. Because life is lived through friendships and partnerships, its burdens will always come from the loss or gain of these. Of cardinal importance is the Friendship with your Creator who gives direction to all other relationships the world is to offer.


All humans, and because they are creatures of one Creator, have a relationship only they can explain with the creator. The tendency to socialise the relationship man has with his Creator, has led to some believing they have a monopoly of wisdom about what the creator wants. We often think and believe that we can define what and who is a blessing to whom, to the exclusion of the possibility of others being blessed by the unfortunate situations of others.


The decisions we make are in most instances about the consequences that come with them. As we age, we make real and deep decisions about our relationships with a clear knowledge of the consequence of losing all that is attached thereto. Our sociability as humans puts us in relationships, especially friendships, that have burdens that are not only of love, but of our selfishness.


If we love each other, we should define what about each other is important. Is it our selfish happiness, or the happiness of those we say we love. Is living a life that makes one in a partnership of two happy fair for the other second person who is not happy. How can the selfishness of partners be regulated to be perpetually about the us and never the me. What if the me overwhelms the us to a level the us does no longer guarantee the possibility of ever being the centre of happiness .


Friends and stakeholders are our reality, but cannot be allowed to be determinate in how we ultimately live our lives. Extended family is the support structure that anchors us when life throws lemons that cannot be made lemonade. Family is the immediate unit whose fragility and brittleness determines the life of future generations. However important and central these relationships, they cannot be sustained with the lie of good life, when good life is an acted reality.


It is thus important to at some point in your life to arrive at the difficult conclusion of seeking the self, independent of what the others will want the self to look like. In any case it is the self that went to the other or accepted the other to create the us and we. Some in the us and we were of  a natural consequence and can thus not be easily ignored as the self is sought. The centrality of the self to happiness is unfortunately the centre of all that has to do with personal hygiene and mental health. A unhappy you can never produce a happy us, even if the them community believes so.


Difficult and costly this journey might be, it is a journey to be taken, lived and embraced. In this journey your life will undergo one of its most consequential reviews. You enter it knowing that there will be a storm in the relationships you  treasure. In fact some might believe losing their overrated status as family or friends might change your call. It is a journey few will emerge as still friends. It is a journey whose completion might have graves of friendships, and standing crippled relationships. As a lived mantra and value, the difficulty of a task, role, and or journey can never be the reason for it not to be undertaken.


As you enter this journey, pray to emerge with only those relationships whose interest in you will be based on your happiness. It is your happiness that will be the tone of all other relationships. For those this journey might result in their unhappiness, sorrow or otherwise, please accept send your apologies before you start, for in the beyond there won't be time and opportunity to do so. A dearth of your relationship should be a consequence you are ready for. It is the reality of the death of what you could have shared that would surely be mourned in the journey.


Let yourself to be, as all others should be, as a human estate, you can only bequeath to yourself happiness, for it is the joy that comes with it that you must at all times be prepared to inherit.

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