It doesn’t always feel good-you may not feel “well” or “happy”-because we are human. Meaning, not pleasure, is the key to a good life.ĭo you feel like your waking hours are meaningful? Do your days, even when they are hard and not paying you what you might want or deserve, feel worthwhile? Do they fill your cup even partly? This is where the good stuff of life is.
#Epic kids scared after reading full#
Authentic happiness can come with understanding that the world can be senselessly brutal and disappointing, but it is also full of love. But if you let yourself admit that your guilt is most likely a form of grief and only useful once, then eventually there will be room inside of you for something else. We blame ourselves because it makes the world a more logical place. We often choose this feeling over confronting what is actually true: that terrible things can happen for no reason at all. Feeling responsible for something terrible gives us a false sense that if we had only done something differently, then we could have prevented the bad thing from happening in the first place. This is especially true when it comes to loss-of a person, place, relationship, job, you-name-it. She is also a Buddhist and she said something to me I’ll never forget: “Guilt is only really helpful once, in the exact moment where it tells you, ‘Oh, I really shouldn’t have done that.’ As soon as you’ve had that thought, the guilt should go away because it’s not useful anymore.” I was on the edge of the Bering Sea in Alaska, reporting a story on bald eagles that behave badly (stealing people’s cell phones, swooping down on their dogs, or tearing into groceries at the local Safeway) when I met a wonderful birder named Suzi. Your fears are simply invitations to become the person you were meant to be. Feeling scared is what allows us to act with courage. Along the way, I found an excellent therapist named Judy who taught me that bravery is not the opposite of fear. I then went on a journey to uncover the wisdom that would lead me to peace. I spent lots of time learning from wise kids and teenagers who, like me, faced profound losses at a young age.
“I used success and achievement like an analgesic on the kinds of feelings I didn’t want to admit I had.” It took me becoming a volunteer working with grieving kids to learn the truth: what scared me most wasn’t what looked like bravery to other people, it was feeling my own difficult feelings that I’d been avoiding since childhood.
Those negative feelings just got stronger and eventually, the pain of them broke through. I used success and achievement like an analgesic on the kinds of feelings I didn’t want to admit I had: regret, guilt, shame, especially about how I’d acted when my dad died the year I turned 17. I chased excellence too-a bestselling book, multiple TED talks, a PhD from MIT, a marriage I thought I was supposed to want. So I hurled myself at all kinds of things that seemed like they’d challenge me-from studying grizzly bears in remote Alaska, to travelling alone through the Amazon basin for months, all before I was old enough to drink. Without fear, you can’t be brave.įor most of my life I believed that if I was afraid of something, then I was weak or not being courageous. Listen to the audio version-read by Laurel herself-in the Next Big Idea App. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Wired, and a variety of other publications.īelow, Laurel shares 5 key insights from her new book, What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey from Loss to Love.
She is the Director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
from MIT in the history and anthropology of science. Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author with a Ph.D.
0 kommentar(er)
