The Attributes for a Better and Happier You

To become a better and happier individual, you need love, compassion, and altruism. These are the attributes necessary not only for redeveloping or reshaping your personality but also for sustaining yourself in this aggressive and ever-changing world. They are the daily foods for your soul to provide you with happiness, inner satisfaction, and joy.

Humanity and Self

Without compassion, you lack self-confidence, which often gives way to anxiety, fear, and insecurity. Compassion enables you to see your own connectedness with others, and you are not alone all by yourself. Once your inner world becomes imbalanced and disharmonized by a lack of self-confidence, you lose your inner calmness, without which you cannot properly utilize your wisdom. Without wisdom, you mind becomes obsessed with negative thoughts of self, leading to wrong actions and toxic consequences. This is where Tao wisdom may come into play by diminishing your ego-self and letting you focus more on others, rather than solely on yourself. Letting go of the ego-self may help you develop compassion and cherish a sense of responsibility for humanity.

Anything and Everything

Awareness of your own responsibility for humanity may enable you to rein in your temper and inhibit your anger. Better understanding of humanity lets you acknowledge the destructive forces of anger, and thereby instrumental in reducing their strength. Your short temper can benefit from Tao wisdom, which shows you the importance and necessity of embracing all—the easy and the difficult, as well as the pleasant and the unpleasant. In life, difficult and unpleasant experiences not only train but also enhance you mental stability to control your temper, which often undermines your compassion for others. Tao wisdom teaches you not to pick and choose but to embrace anything and everything in life because any situation in life can make you become either a teacher or a student. Life is about anything and everything that you can learn from, and this is where true wisdom comes from.

Understanding that anything is everything may also make you see things very differently. People and things do not exist independently. When there is long, there has to be short; they do not exist simply because of their own nature. Everything in life is not only relative but also related. Viewing any life situation—whether it is good or bad—with this profound human wisdom may help you see that anything is everything, In other words, any life situation is not under its own power but depends on many present causes and conditions, as well as many past causes and conditions; otherwise it could not have come into being. With this perspective, you can see much more of the whole picture, and thus you can see the reality of the situation.

Stephen Lau     

Copyright© by Stephen Lau