The start of the Chinese lunar year yesterday again brings to mind thoughts about this essential journey called "life." We go through it in legs or laps. Each lap starts on the New Year and ends just before the next New Year. Then the cycle begins again.
Along the way on each cycle are many pitfalls and stumbling blocks; valleys and mountains, too. By and large, the quality of our life experience is not as much gauged by where we eventually get to, as how well we managed along the way.
We've been raised to believe that if we work hard enough we get to spend the next phase of our lives in total relaxation and comfort. No quite true. Even those who appear to be having everything still have their own day-to-day struggles.
We can, however, choose to enjoy life, despite the inevitable tolls of living. We can learn to master our thoughts and emotions, such that we can choose how we feel about life, in whatever state our life is. But what control do we have over such spontaneous, involuntary thing as feelings?
To many of us, our emotional life is the most common area of failures. We don't have a problem when it comes to positive emotions, like love as well as feelings of kindness, enthusiasm, happiness and all others that make our experience of life nice and smooth, even wonderful. It's the negative emotions of hate, anger, jealousy, sadness, fear, worthlessness that saddles our journey.
We, therefore, need to constantly brace ourselves against negative feelings, lest we waste away precious life energies. It is so easy to feel discouraged, to be hurt, to lose enthusiasm. What's worse, these often creep in undetected until they have already taken hold of us.
Life has its "down" moments, for all. It helps to think that life does not operate according to our will but by the will of the Supreme Power that sets the order of the whole universe. Faith heals, as we have seen in the phenomenon of faith healing. If it can heal physical ailments, it can also heal our emotional hurts and soothe our worries.
Others may appear to be luckier than us. Yet they may be luckier only in areas where we are deficient. Conversely, we may be luckier than them in other ways. No one has the total advantage, or disadvantage, in life.
And luck, good luck, is something everyone tries to set off at the beginning of the year. There is a tradition of attract good luck in the New Year - a set of round fruits, sweet and sticky dishes, polka-dotted dress, and deafening noise of firecrackers to drive away evil. People do it year after year - which can be taken to mean that it does not work at all, otherwise why be seeking the same things every time?
The quality of our life experience is not as much something we get as something we make. Luck is not something we stumble upon and pick up and get away with. Rather, like life itself, it is something we create for ourselves.
Sometimes it is to one's advantage that he is not lucky, because, then he will be prompted to awaken the fighting spirit that under better conditions remains in idle slumber within him. And yet, it is good enough that one continues to perform the same New Year rituals year after year. It is even good enough that one complains about the hardships of living. At least it means the person is still actively going through life's challenging journey.
There's an anecdote: Two men look out through the grills of the prison window. One sees mud, the other stars. Different outlooks but one hope. But they both look outside to remind themselves of the feeling of being free.