Personal Survival Guide

What makes a happy life? Is it friends and family, money and esteem, or is it excitement and travel? Is it love? What is the missing ingredient to making a day worth exploring and a life worth living?

In my opinion, a happy life is linear with an understanding of self. It is linear with questioning personal standards and coding life actions by upholding those standards. Do you take the time to reflect on your words before a thought becomes an action? Do you take the time to reflect on your direction and exemplify your goals toward the higher purpose of being a more caring and compassionate person? Would you not agree that our eventual and higher purpose is to be happy: to live a good and just life?

The following are my thoughts on what it means to be happy and to live a virtuous life. Here you go, and may you enjoy.

Day in and night out, I consistently state an internal motto to cope with situations in order to bypass unexpected scenarios. When frustration rears its ugly head and nips at my mental, it can be so easy to nip back and loose a verbal assault of anger and incipient insults. This internal reaction occurs for a second or two when I am confronted by ugly frustrations - in the past, I would automatically sputter a regrettable reply. Nowadays, I choose to breathe deep internally and release an external reflection opposed to a reactive action.

I have a secret to share with everyone but I will only promise to tell it if you promise not to keep it a secret. Most people are afraid to tell secrets because secrets can be a formula for success over an obstacle to personal development and knowledge. But withholding valuable and simplistic wisdom does not enable anyone to succeed in this life. However, before I devolve my secret it is important to understand what I hold priceless in life.

Ethics: yes, ethics. Ethics are the code of non-contradictory moral principles that I use to judge my decisions and actions. For example, I believe dishonesty is wrong and therefore will not lie even if it means saving my own ass. To progress that thought a little further: I have refined my virtues as a step above my ethical principles because virtues are moral practices that must be reflected upon daily. Virtues are the credo in life that enable me to make ethical decisions because my virtues have trained my mental capacities to already know what to do before I have to do. It essentially comes down to who judges me after this life has expired and not who judges me during my time on this mortal plane.

So, with that thought in mind, here's my secret: I have come to see over the past six years of my life that it is critical to apply patience in your life. The only end result anger has ever supplied is to hurt another human either physically or mentally - and that is not the end result to which we need aspire. Human beings have an unlimited capacity for compassion and love for other fellow human beings - we all know what it means to feel pure joy and love flood our souls. We also know what it means to feel pain or suffering - we know it is unnecessary as well. Yet why does it come down to us having to choose between pain and love? Why is it that we incessantly choose to pile the former upon others instead of the latter? Why is pain so readily available in our lives when happiness is so hard to come upon?

I encourage you to reflect on your thoughts before those thoughts become an action. I encourage you to value patience as a virtue because it will allow you to bypass previously coded reactions. Patience enables us to recognize the triggers that transform an individual from a sane person into a sputtering-frothy-spittle-producing-ball-of-rage. Patience offers the ability to not only recognize the triggers that set us off but specifically recognize who we are after the frustration has passed - to see that we held our mental stability while everyone else lost theirs. Patience offers us the opportunity to gain composure not to lose composure.

Patience is not easy to come by. It takes practice and training of your mental to achieve a moment of clarity in the heat of battle. Patience means biting your tongue instead of lashing out. Patience means loving your enemy and finding their good points versus their bad. Tough, I know, and it is one aspect of patience that I am learning every single day. It can be so easy to forget who you are and what you want; and it can be so hard to hold your voice and listen to reason. It is not simple; in no way, shape, or form is it simple. It is not meant to be. But you must at least attempt before you even give up on an idea.

Virtues such as patience help us grow and develop into a higher form of being - a form of being higher than surface level frustrations; higher than surface level insignificances. Personally, through the practice of patience on a consistent day in and night out basis, I have come to see that my character has evolved oh so quickly. Patience allows me to see my past grievances for what they are: simple mistakes that I made before and now I do my best to clear my thoughts before those mistakes happen again.

We learn from mistakes. We learn from our indiscretions. We learn from other people. Through it all we learn how to segue knowledge into wisdom. It is through wisdom that we evolve. Think about it. That is all I can ask. Tell me if you agree. Tell me if you disagree. Tell me a time when patience saved you from making a horrible mistake or loosing an unnecessary scathing response. Even better: tell me sometime down the road that frustration was nipping at you and instead of nipping back, well; tell me you remembered my words. Tell me that those words made a world of distance and in that one second of reflection - tell me you felt an evolution taking place. Tell me in that one second that you felt happiness enter your soul. Tell me it made you smile. Until we meet again, my friends, until we meet again.

"The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience." - Leo Tolstoy