mother had entered the hospital for a surgery and there were complications. Though we did not know it at the time, she would not leave the hospital alive. In the days and weeks after the surgery, there were times of hope and improvement, as well as setbacks and despair regarding her recovery. It was a difficult and challenging time for all of the members of my family.
However, as painful as it was for all of us, it is one of the experiences I can look back on and view as a time I was able to cultivate genuine happiness. I say this because, although this was a time of tragedy for our family, we were all able to be there for our mother, and for each other. We set up a schedule, taking shifts so she had one of us with her twenty-four hours a day. As her time came to an end, we were all able to be with her at her bedside. Before she passed, we were able to tell her she had done a good job with us and that we were all okay—this is what mothers worry about the most; they worry about their kids. We let her know that it was okay for her to go, and that we were grateful for everything she had done for us.
Although I feel tears beginning to flow and I am flooded with the emotion as I write this, I can tell you that being able to participate in her last hours in such a beneficial way was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. It has contributed greatly to my well-being. Every time I reflect upon it, I am grateful for the way my family and I were able to be there for her, as well as for each other. While we all felt the sadness and loss that is a natural part of grieving, feelings of connection, gratitude, and warmth also enveloped this experience.
Consciously paying attention to our intention is the skill that allows us to transform our everyday experiences into meaningful ones. This is not just true of difficult situations, but also those that are pleasurable or even neutral. Any activity we consciously engage in with attention and intention is an opportunity to cultivate our highest potential. The key is to be accurately aware of our motivation.
Something as simple as having friends over for a meal can have different effects on us based on our motivation and engagement in the activity. Let’s look at two different motivations:
1. We are motivated to have friends over because we value them. We invite them over and, with love, prepare a meal for them we hope they will find delicious and nourishing.
2. We are motivated to have friends over to impress them with our cooking skills. We invite them over for a meal and hope they will enjoy it while seeing us as amazing in the kitchen.
In the first case, if our values include friendship, connection, generosity, and making others happy, our meal is clearly in alignment with our values, and the meal becomes a meaningful experience on multiple levels that creates a lasting sense of well-being. Even if the meal is overcooked or does not turn out the way we had hoped, we can still share an evening together that meets the goal of expressing how much we value the friendships.
However, if we carry over the same values to the second scenario, we will find our motivation—to have others see us as good cooks, seeking their validation and praise—conflicts with those values. So, even if we value generosity and making others happy, the motivation here is ultimately to make us happy by having others see us as valuable, skilled, and so on. If they enjoy the meal and compliment us, we will experience a temporary feeling of happiness. This happiness is stimulus-driven—contingent upon the meal being delicious and others viewing and responding to us positively. If the meal goes poorly, it can create disappointment and dissatisfaction in us. This up-and-down cycle of temporary moments of pleasure and pain, contingent upon outside circumstances, can change dramatically if we learn to consciously pay attention to our motivations and align our actions with our values.
Unfortunately, most of us live our lives unconsciously, busily going from one thing to the next without reflecting on our motivations, values, and the deeper meaning of our lives. Living this way leaves us vulnerable to letting normal ups and downs trigger a wide range of temporary emotional experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, which dominate our lives.
All too often, we wind up reacting to the challenges and opportunities in our lives instead of responding to them with clarity and wisdom. When we react, it is usually an unconscious action arising from and colored by an emotion such as fear, surprise, anger, or joy. As I will discuss later, when we’re caught up in an emotion it is difficult to see events clearly, often causing us to be reactive. To use a common analogy, it is a lot like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic to make it as comfortable as possible instead of focusing on turning the ship in the direction of safety. We are able to find temporary pleasures here and there, but unable to direct our lives in a way that is most meaningful.
We can develop the ability to overcome our reactive tendencies with mindfulness. When we are mindful, we are able to recognize our emotions being triggered and not get caught up in them. We can pause, bring awareness into the moment, and reflect upon the most beneficial way to respond, both in the moment and in the long-term. In this way, we empower ourselves to make conscious choices that cultivate lasting well-being for ourselves and others.
Another model we can use to illustrate how easy it is to fall into the trap of confusing short-term, stimulus-driven pleasure with genuine happiness is the Eight Worldly Concerns. The Eight Worldly Concerns is a Buddhist teaching that illustrates how our preoccupation with temporary happiness actually creates more long-term suffering. Although it stems from Buddhist philosophy, this is a universal teaching that clearly applies to all of us. If we examine them closely, we find these are primary motivating factors, either consciously or unconsciously, in nearly everything we do. They are:
• Gain and loss: We are happy when we get what we want and not happy when we lose things or people we like. Thus, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to get what we want and avoid losing what we have.
• Pleasure and pain: It is quite natural that we enjoy pleasurable experiences and want to avoid pain. Usually, from the moment we get out of bed in the morning, we are trying to find and engage in pleasurable activities and avoid painful ones.
• Praise and criticism: We like it when people praise us and we don’t like it when people criticize us. On subtle levels, we spend a lot of time seeking validation from others and avoiding their displeasure.
• Good reputation and bad reputation (also called fame and insignificance): We want people to think highly of us, and we don’t feel good when others think ill of us or believe we don’t have much to offer.
Having these motivations is normal and not a problem in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with seeking the things we need and trying to avoid losing them, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, appreciating validation from others, and having a good reputation. The problem comes when we allow these temporary concerns to override our long-term well-being and happiness. Because such worldly concerns are stimulus driven, they are temporary and, rather than cultivate meaning, they often create worry, rumination, and unnecessary suffering when we allow them to be our primary guiding motivation. As with all stimulus-driven pleasures and pains, we need to remember their limitations.
The problem is, over time, we have become so habituated by these worldly concerns that they become our default motivations. We constantly make decisions and engage in activities with them as our primary concern without factoring in or reflecting on our values. In the quest to get what we want, be accepted by others, or just feel good, we often go against our own values in ways so subtle that we aren’t even aware of them. When we are in alignment with our values, we do the right thing regardless of gain or loss, pain or pleasure, praise or criticism, good or bad reputation, and we feel much better about ourselves.
What others think about us is not nearly as important as what we think about ourselves. It is important to bring reflection and wisdom into our choices. If we value honesty, it is important to tell our boss or our friends the truth when we make a mistake,
