| 
“My grandmother always used to say that a loving outlook was the cure to all ills. I agree. Most of our ills stem from an absence of a loving outlook. We need to start viewing our bodies, our lives, and the world we share as a loved one.”
— Mickie Kent
Life doesn't come with ready-made answers. This is something we come to realise in January, the month of good intentions, than any other time. Our life stories feel like TV dramas that just don't end right. As the festive mood fades away we are left having eaten too much and feeling a little less full in the pocket and the heart. And when things don't go our way, we tend to release our anger or frustration in an unhealthy way.
Part of the problem is the concept of "life purpose" itself. The idea that we were each born for some higher purpose and it's now our cosmic mission to find it. In fact, there are many people that are not clear on what their dreams are, and unfortunately, sometimes not having a dream or a specific goal in life, can lead to an unfulfilled path. But here's the truth: We exist on this earth for some undetermined period of time. During that time we do things. Some of these things are important. Some of them are unimportant. And those important things give our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant ones basically just kill time.
So when people say, "What should I do with my life?" or "What is my life purpose?" what they're actually asking is: "What can I do with my time that is important?" This is an infinitely better question to ask, or rather a better outlook to have. It's far more manageable and it doesn't have all of the baggage that the "life purpose" question might do. It also makes things less stressful.
Stress is a formidable threat to happiness - when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer. Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus - an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small "arms" that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons.
Just think: This is the kind of toxicity we're faced with when we drown in disappointment. And it creates two types of people. Those unaware of the negative impact that they have on themselves and those around them, and those who seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people's buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and, worst of all, stress.
This stress skews our outlook, and consequently our reactions to life's challenges. Remember, even though it's not possible to change a situation that's occurred in the past or in the now, you can always control how you react to it and that is what will determine your overall happiness. Many of the negative thoughts and feelings you have are nothing more than a mere reflection of your past, projected into the present moment.
In the world today, the outlook feels a dreary one for this exact same reason. And we are met with prime examples in quick succession. There is no "but" about what happened at Charlie Hebdo this week. Some people published some cartoons in Paris, and some other people killed them for it. The cartoons at the heart of the violence are racist and offensive, but the response to them was double-fold.
Most democracies would not find someone expressing an opinion shocking - words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offence against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans.
Likewise, for the last decade and a half the United States, backed to varying degrees by the governments of other Western countries, has rained violence and destruction on the Arab and Muslim world with a ferocity that has few parallels in the history of modern warfare, leaving Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands. All with stories, with lives, with families. Tens of millions who have lost friends, family, homes and watched their country be torn apart. You might be shocked to know that toddlers with guns killed more Americans in 2013 than any terrorist attack, and it's been said that most victims of terrorism are Muslim. Who will walk in protest for them?
One of the founding members of Charlie Hebdo has even accused its slain editor, Patrick Charbonnier, or Charb, of "dragging the team" to their deaths by releasing increasingly provocative cartoons, as five million copies of the "survivors’ edition" went on sale. It seems the PR worked - all too horribly well. For those who walked in protest of the Hebdo murders may have done so under the misguided belief it's for freedom of expression, but in honesty it was in confirmation of a century or more of Western colonial policies that through blood and iron have consigned all but a tiny few among the population of the Arab world to poverty and hopelessness.
Not to even mention the brutal rule of French colonialism in Algeria, and its preparedness to murder hundreds of thousands of Algerians and even hundreds of French-Algerian citizens in its efforts to maintain the remnants of empire. The protests and Hebdo selling spree (and its profitable outfall) is a slap in the face of the ongoing poverty, ghettoisation and persecution endured by the Muslim population of France, which is mostly of Algerian origin.
Does this excuse the Hebdo murders? Of course not. It doesn't even provide a reasonable explanation. It does, however, show that we are all bereaved human beings. And unless we change our outlook, the world may indeed be destroyed under our inhumane reactions. It really is a case of swings and roundabouts. It's well documented, for example, Britain's treatment of Irish prisoners during the seventies became the benchmark for American torture in the Middle East. The torture methods developed by the British Army deemed acceptable set a precedent.
We now live in a world where terror suspects are arrested every day in the United Kingdom to combat the rising threat of the Islamic state to itself and Europe. Prosecutors have said the British frontman of a Syrian terror group is one of the most violent extremists to ever return to the UK, as he was jailed for 12 years. Meanwhile, as Germany's "anti-Islamisation" movement centred in Dresden, Pegida, spreads to the UK and other European countries since the Paris attacks - it feels like the set-up for a huge confrontation between fascism and fundamentalism.
And it's not the only confrontation on the horizon. In Brussels and other European capitals, the fear of Vladimir Putin is becoming palpable. The mood has changed in a matter of weeks to one of foreboding with claims that Putin is acting like a tyrant. The Ukraine crisis started with differences, which became a conflict, which became a war, and which now risks becoming total war. This calls for a shift in awareness, and a consciousness of the imbalance we have created and continue to perpetuate by our disproportionate reactions. And when life is serious we need to get less serious.
As a species we can be bold and imaginative or bullying and fearful. To lesser or larger degrees, we all go back and forth on the extreme ends of the human spectrum. The key is to find a way to maintain a balanced outlook. According to many ancient traditions, the key to looking good and feeling great is balance in the four main areas of life: body, mind, spirit and space. This includes not just the foods we eat, but how we spend our time in activity, both physical and mental, our relationships, our environment, and so on.
This is why so many January diets fall at the first hurdle. They are less about balance and more about the determination to starve. Starve the body of essential nourishment. Starve the mind of exuberance and wit. Starve the spirit of joy and contentment. This leaves us malnourished in mind, body and soul - further disconnected and imbalanced, mirrored by our reactions to life's challenges.
This paves the way for stress, and for uncertainty over finding purpose in our lives. It leaves our hearts energetically sickened, too weak to bring its perspective to our lives. To awaken the heart to this imbalance, not only is it important to learn about self-acceptance and self-love, but also to identify and release what's hurting us emotionally. And we need to build more on togetherness to find more of the feelgood. Because when we are living through times where animals can teach us a thing or two about our humanity, then it's time for a re-think.
But as complex as our lives may get, the answer is increasingly simple. The great balancer in life is love, we just need to let it do its thing. We need to use its outlook to formulate our own, to boldly fly in the face of our fears as we hold on, ever tightly, to each other and what makes us human.
Yours in love,
