New Year resolutions for love & happiness

A new year has just begun and you and me continue to seek for peace, love & happiness, first and foremost in our lives and then in the world around us. We are given a fresh start not only at the beginning of the year, but every morning when we wake up we have the chance to start anew and make things right.


LOVE



This year I intend to spread the message of LOVE more than before because I noticed most people's actions (from the people in our families to those we work with and those who rule our nations) show that they do not understand the meaning of the word LOVE.
In order to really understand the word LOVE let us look at the images of a rose, a lamp and a tree. Is it possible for a rose to say, "I shall only offer my fragrance to good people, and withhold it from bad people?" Or can you imagine a lamp withholding its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light. It can only do so by ceasing to be a lamp. Again have you noticed how a tree gives the shade to everyone good or bad, young or old, even the one who seeks to cut it down. These three things, the rose, the lamp and the tree display an indiscriminate quality of love that if we all were to practice would make this world so full of bliss.
The second quality is free giving. Like the tree, the rose and the lamp, real love gives and asks for nothing in return. Wouldn't you despise a woman whose choice of a husband was determined not by any virtous quality he may have but by the amount of money he has. But is the love of a man towards a woman any different if it is determined by outer beauty only. Love looks beyond the exterior of a person and sees inside their heart. Unconditional love for thy neighbor is difficult because people tend to seek the company of those who bring them emotional gratification and avoid those who don't. People tend to be positively disposed towards those who give them what they want and live up to their expectations and tend to be negative or indifferent towards those who don't. Open your eyes and see your, "so called love," for what it really is, a camouuflage/disguise for selfishness and greed. These three things, the rose, the lamp and the tree display an unconditional love for us humans that could heal the world if we all were to emulate it towards all thy neighbors.
The third quality of love is its unself-consciousness. Love enjoys the loving and is blissfully unaware of itself. The way the lamp is busy shining with no thought of whether it is benefiting others or not. The way a rose gives out its fragrance simply because that is the way it is, whether there is someone to enjoy its fragrance or not. The way a tree offers its shade. The light, the fragrance and the shade are not produced at the approach of likable persons and turned off when there is no one there or dislikable characters approach. These three things, the rose, the lamp and the tree display a quality of love that encourages us to love thy neighbors naturally without any consciousness of any merit of doing so.
The final quality of love is its freedom. The moment coercion or control or conflict enter, love dies. It destroys your capacity to love which is your very nature.
Love is the emblem of eternity, it confounds all notion of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end. Dear readers let us in this new year open our hearts wide enough to give love and receive & embrace it in our lives and in the world at large. Love is taking action — positive, genuine, definite action — to reach out and help others, proving your love for them.





















HAPPINESS



Happiness is a destination which each of us is capable of arriving at if we drive ourselves to it, none but ourselves can drive us to that destination because there is only one person who for certain can tell what will make one happy and that person is one's self. Only you can say where the road to your happiness goes, for one sets his/her goals for the hour, for the relationship and for the phase of life. If you take the wrong road to happiness you will be like the motorist who plunges off onto the verge, the result can be a wreckage of a potential happy moment, a wreckage of a relationship, a wreckage of a life. This year let us use compass and map to make sure that the road to happiness we take does not lead us to a dead end, or to the edge of a cliff. There will be no happiness wreckages this year, by faith.
This is not to say that this year will be smooth sailing, how can it be when we are not yet in heaven. You may feel at times like a spinning leaf blown along a dirty street, you may feel like a grain of sand stuck in one place. But nobody has ever told us that life was a calm and orderly thing, it isn't. The good thing is that you don't have to feel like a wind-propelled leaf helplessly blown all over the place without any sense of effective direction or feel like a grain of sand helplessly stuck there with other grains with no room to manouver, you can to a greater or lesser degree draw your road map to happiness and follow it.
You may feel like things are such now that it is much too late to do anything, that your past road is so messed up that there is no chance of drawing a future one that will be any different. Stop thinking like that because there is always a point on the road when you can map a new one and try to follow it. There is no person alive who can not make a new beginning.
It can be said without the slightest fear of contradiction that others may mock you and seek by various means to push you onto the edge or to tempt you in various ways to do what is not right and you will end up if you don't resist them in tragedy and sorrow, never happiness. So who said the road to happiness doesn't have bumps? It can still be travelled. So people can fall down, it doesn't mean that they can't get up again and keep going.
True happiness, joy and excitement does not come from broken lives. If you can get others to follow their own roads to happiness, you yourself will be free enough to give yourself a chance to discover what real happiness is. It always pays to put others before yourself, it's the path to true happiness. The way to happiness is made much brighter by applying the precept, "Treat others as you would want them to treat you." You are the driver to the destination which is your own happiness so it's all up to you, all this blog can do is show you the edges of the road to the destination and wish you a safe journey. If you have the edges of the road to happiness in sight, you can't go far wrong.






IN 2009 I WISH YOU ALL LOTS OF PEACE, LOVE AND HAPPINESS.
A wise man will take stock of his life once in a while by asking, "What am I doing to help people? What will I be remembered for? Am I making a difference by making others' lives better, richer or happier?"