Log 5

For this week’s blog, I chose another book to read since I’ve almost finished reading the first book. The new book I selected is called “build the life you want,” which mainly focuses on the meaning of emotions and the ways to live with emotions, no matter good or bad. The reason I chose this book is that mental health is a very crucial issue for modern people that is often overlooked, so I want to spend some time getting deeper into this topic. This week, I read the first chapter, which includes the content like “myths about happiness,” “what is happiness,” “the role of unhappiness,” “appreciating bad feelings,” etc. These sub-chapters are what touched me the most after reading the whole chapter.

Before I read this book, I thought that pursuing happiness is a life goal, and nothing is more important than being happy. Therefore, I always blindly followed the methods provided by other people saying that they may help me become happier, like painting, doing exercise, mountain-climbing, etc. Though I did feel delighted at the beginning, I gradually lost the enthusiasm of doing these things and found them less useful to amuse me, for they were not the things I truly liked. And also, I didn’t really know what made me happy. Apart from chasing after happiness, I also regarded negative feelings as a bad thing before, deeming they were just like a beast torturing our hearts. With that idea in mind, I tended to avoid these emotions, trying to persuade myself to quickly get out of this situation and try to be happier. This behavior instead made me get stuck in the negative emotion for a very long time. However, after I read the first chapter, I totally changed my mind. Now in my view, happiness is not a goal but a direction; unhappiness is not absolutely a bad thing but something that may help you grow and learn. If we just consistently pursue happiness with purposes, then we won’t truly become happier. We have to know that being happy is a temporary status, not a permanent status. Even if we feel pleasant, there might be other mixtures of emotions in our mood at the same time. That is to say, it’s nearly impossible that we feel completely happy. As a result, it’s meaningless for us to intentionally pursue happiness. On the other hand, sometimes being in a bad mood is not definitely a poor thing. Take a normal thing that all human beings will encounter for example. We all make mistakes, sometimes it’s serious while sometimes it’s not. When making mistakes, we may be scolded by parents, teachers or classmates, and that might affect our mood. But it is those mistakes that make us grow and learn from the experience. When we look back at the past mistakes we've made, we will instead cherish those experiences making us become a better and stronger person. 

I pretty adore the sentence the author mentioned in the conclusion. It said, “be grateful for the bees, not just the honey.” In our life, there must be ups and downs. Life is not plain sailing. Thus, we should enjoy every moment in our life, no matter if it is good or bad. These experiences are a part of our life journey. Just like you know, there might be some surprises or accidents during the journey. So why not just take your life as a journey? These surprises or accidents will be unforgettable things in your whole life. They might even be a vital turning point that makes you become a unique person. In a nutshell, embrace your life without any fears and enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime journey !