For years Donna and I have been regularly associated with Rita, an elderly woman in town. Because of a lifetime of poor decisions, she can't work but subsists on a meager income from disability and social security. We assist her with shopping, laundry, transportation, and the like. Always demanding and seldom cooperative, Rita can be quite difficult. She never thinks ahead, instead consistently choosing to minimize her immediate discomfort, so she lives from one crisis to the next.
Lately, we moved her to an apartment in a reasonably priced and safer part of town, but her neighbors sometimes took advantage of her absences by breaking the windows of her door and helping themselves to her belongings. We responded by installing a solid door, but then one day she took so many of her "nerve pills" (sedatives and narcotics) that she couldn't get up from the floor. Using her cell phone, she called the police, who punched a hole through the solid door in order to reach her.
The ambulance personnel helped her, but then the hole in the door made her more susceptible to the next robbery. We installed heavy plywood reinforcement to the door, but then she overdosed again, called the police, and once again there was a gaping hole in her door.
Most of us live like this, emotionally speaking. We've made so many bad decisions that we're on the edge of emotional survival all the time. We try to minimize our pain, but this creates yet other problems. In our attempts to solve these, we create even more problems, and so on.
We can't go back and change the decisions that led to our present precarious position, but we can ask people who are loving and happy to show us how to see ourselves and others differently. We can learn to make different choices, ones that will build genuine happiness, rather than simply solving crises. The process will occasionally be painful, and often unsettling, but until we're willing to really change how we live, we'll keep getting the same unhappy results.
You CAN change how you live and get happy results. Read or listen to Real Love, The Simple Truth About Finding Unconditional Love & Fulfilling Relationships today.
