Want To Lead A Good Life?

What is a good life? What is happiness? What is success? What is pleasure? How should I treat people who I am surrounded with? How should I cope with unfortunate events? How can I get away from unnecessary worry? How should I handle freedom and success? What keeps me healthier and happier in life? If I were going to invest now in my future best self, where would I put my time and energy? 

These are a few questions that we must ask ourselves in our daily lives. In our own capacities, regardless of the fact what we do for our living, we must attempt to answer all these important questions in our own ways.

However, the answers to all these questions are given by learned men of this world through their experiences and teachings. 

Former President of the League of Nations (Now United Nations) and a key leader of the Pakistan Movement, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III, writes in an article titled “My Philosophy of Happiness”: 

1. Happiness never depends on one’s surroundings; it depends altogether and exclusively on oneself. 
2. You should endeavour to suit your desire to the event, and not the event to your desire.

In a famous book “The Ten Golden Rules” by Panos Mourdoukoutas and Michael Soupios write:

1. Examine life, engage life with vengeance; always search for new pleasures and new destines to reach with your mind.
2. Worry only about the things that are in your control, the things that can be influenced and changed by your actions, not about the things that are beyond your capacity to direct or alter.
3. Treasure Friendship, the reciprocal attachment that fills the need for affiliation. Friendship cannot be acquired in the market place, but must be nurtured and treasured in relations imbued with trust and amity. 
4. Experience True Pleasure. Avoid shallow and transient pleasures. Keep your life simple. Seek calming pleasures that contribute to peace of mind. True pleasure is disciplined and restrained. 
5. Master Yourself. Resist any external force that might delimit thought and action; stop deceiving yourself, believing only what is personally useful and convenient; complete liberty necessitates a struggle within, a battle to subdue negative psychological and spiritual forces that preclude a healthy existence; self-mastery requires ruthless cador. 
6. Avoid Excess. Live life in harmony and balance. Avoid excesses. Even good things, pursued or attained without moderation, can become a source of misery and suffering. 
7. Be a Responsible Human Being. Approach yourself with honesty and thoroughness; maintain a kind of spiritual hygiene; stop the blame-shifting for your errors and shortcomings. 
8. Don’t Be a Prosperous Fool. Prosperity by itself, is not a cure-all against an ill-led life, and may be a source of dangerous foolishness. Money is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the good life, for happiness and wisdom. 
9. Don’t Do Evil to Others. Evildoing is a dangerous habit, a kind of reflex too quickly resorted to and too easily justified that has a lasting and damaging effect upon the quest for the good life. Harming others claims two victims—the receiver of the harm, and the victimizer, the one who does harm.
10. Kindness towards others tends to be rewarded. Kindness to others is a good habit that supports and reinforces the quest for the good life. Helping others bestows a sense of satisfaction that has two beneficiaries—the beneficiary, the receiver of the help, and the benefactor, the one who provides the help.

Now we shall discuss another interesting facet of human life. Millennials Surveys asked a few questions to their target audience on what their most important life goals were?

1. Over 80% replied: The major life goal for them was to get rich.
2. Another 50% of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous. We are constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We are given the impression that these are the things that we need to get after in order to have a good life. 

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life, we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything 2020. We forget vast amounts of what happened to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative. But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? 

The Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done. For 75 years, they have tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their family lives, their health, and asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out. Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Key Lessons about relationships derived from the study are:

• Social connections are really good for us and the loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they are physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than five Americans will report than they are lonely. And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a jam-packed corporate concert and even in a marriage.

• We learn here is that it is not just the number of friends you have, and it is not whether or not you are in a committed relationship, but it is the quality of your close relationships that matters.  It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High conflict workplaces and marriages e.g. without any empathy, much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting separated or divorced. And living in midst of warn relationships is protective. 

• Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in time of need, those people’s memories stay sharper and longer. And the people in relationships where they feel they really cannot count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time. To summarize, the good, close relationships are good for our health and wellbeing, this is wisdom that is as old as the mountains. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? We are human. What we would really like is a quick fix, something we can get that will make our lives good and keep them that way. Remember, relationships are complex and complicated and the hard work if tending to family, friends and peers at work, it is not fancy or glamorous. In some cases, it is lifelong. It never ends. 

Ending Note: 

We must understand that Happiness is the ultimate purpose in life. It is achievable for all of us. Happiness is determined more by our minds than by our circumstances. Happiness in life adds and multiples as we divide it with others.

So, what about us? The Possibilities are practically endless. It might be something as simple as replacing time with people or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new altogether, long walks and meeting up people, or reaching out to that family member, an old friend or an older colleague at work who haven’t spoken to in years because those all-too-common feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges. While he was looking back on his life, the great author Mark Twain once said more than a century ago: “There isn’t time, so brief is life - for bickerings, apologies, heartburning, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. The good life is built with good relationships.” 

The bottom line is: Nothing else keeps us happier and healthier but Good relationships.

What does a good and meaningful life mean to you? Do you know of more ways about how to lead a good life and be happy? Share in the comments below. For more articles, please visit: www.evolvehr.org/reading.