“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” - Marcel Pagnol

Don't ROB yourself of HAPPINESS!

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I have always loved this quote because it is such a simplistic yet accurate depiction of things. If we are not happy then what is the point in anything that we do with our waking hours? What is the entire purpose of life, if not to embrace love and experience happiness?!

Yet every single day I see so many people cross my path and from what I can see of them in terms of facial expression and body language – many are apparently anything but happy. I often contemplate what it is that is making them feel that way – is it something specific and current that they are dealing with or is it just their lives in general that are making them miserable?

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I hate bringing up negative news but this has been milling around my head for days now and I am so utterly confused by it. Recently, there was quite a horrendous murder very close to where I live. In short, a woman’s burnt body was found in the boot of a car. It was discovered that she had been killed prior to being put in the boot and set on fire and after further investigation it has been established that it was her husband that killed her.

According to reports, their marriage was not in a good place, and all of this I can understand and grasp. I get that perhaps they both had a lot of stress in their lives, be it emotional, financial, work related – whatever… but what I simply cannot process is how someone can be SO unhappy in a situation that they would resort to those measures? The murder was clearly premeditated which means a relative amount of thought has been given to it – and what boggles my mind is that if murdering your wife was a solution to “whatever problem/s” you were facing - this means that you have entertained the thought that things would be “better” after murdering her… HOW is it that if you could go through this entire thought process, how is it possible that you did not consider the reality of arrest and jail time?

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Now, anybody who knows anything about prisons around the world will know that Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison is one of the most dangerous prisons in the world. So I fail to see how spending the rest of your life behind bars in there seemed like a better option than let’s say possibly… getting a divorce or at the very least a separation…

I know nothing of their personal lives so I am merely sharing my thoughts on the matter… my opinion if you will. It just seems to me that many people seem to sway either to one severity or another when it comes to dealing with the issues in their lives. They either do nothing about it at all… letting it eat away and destroy their happiness bit by bit or they flip right to the other side of the coin and resort to such drastic measures that impact the course of their lives forever and ultimately leave them riddled with guilt and remorse too.

The permanent impact which that decision will have on that family is so enormous – especially for the children because they have not only lost their mother, but their father too in a sense. Lets say the parents had decided to get a divorce… yes that would have been a huge emotional hurdle to overcome but at the end of it all, they would all have eventually returned to a place of happiness in their lives (most likely anyway) – and definitely more likely than now.

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I think that more of an effort should be made to find a slightly more moderate approach to things - A happy medium that is perhaps a slower process, but ultimately renders a more fruitful result.

Life can be terribly stressful in today’s society and many of us walk around carrying burdens that are far too heavy to be carrying alone. Denying the weight of these burdens is not doing us any favours as the weight of them will only continue to increase until eventually we collapse. Expression and release of this baggage lightens the load and enables us to continue striving for a place of happiness.

Well, those are my thoughts on it anyway...

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Until next time...

Much Love from Cape Town, South Africa xxx

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