part one: convincement, contemplation, and realization

For the longest time, I thought I had my whole life figured out. Being young and naive, I was convinced that life would go according to plan. Obviously, it never does. Canceling dreams, becoming more realistic, and readjusting your dreams are things that you gotta do along the way.

I traveled, I met people who inspired me, I spent time reading and learning new things. And the more I learned about myself and about what made me feel fulfilled, the more lost I felt. Like, I enjoy this thing or that thing and I’m actually pretty good at it. But this particular thing is not what I planned for, and paid for college for.

So, now what? What do I do with these realizations?

Don’t get me wrong, my years spent at university were very valuable for me. But I realized that what had guided my academic decisions and so many other decisions throughout my life had not always been for the purpose of happiness. Sometimes, it is rather for the purpose of comfort and security.

I like observing people, and every other time, I remember thinking to myself that these people must have fears that robbed them out of their happiness and sense of fulfillment. It’s good to be a little scared sometimes. I know I am scared a couple of other times, thinking about this or that. But it was a good kind of scared because it made me realize how small and insignificant we are in this universe, and that, in turn, put everything that I had feared up until that point in a different light. That, anything that I had feared was rather insignificant also.

I knew that the fear of staying at a place that made you feel completely drained was far worse than the fear of not really knowing what to do next. So, I guess you gotta pick your fears in life.

Turning the fears for the pursuit of fulfillment

Feeling fulfilled does not meet by achieving quantitative happiness i.e., materialistic objects. Sure thing, an object worth IDR 50Mio is not invented to just give nothing to us. And sure thing, even though money isn’t everything, but everything needs money. It is the tool for achieving what we want, and fulfilling our wants and needs is important for our own self-fulfillment. It would be naive to say money isn’t important because I know it is, but the fact remains it isn’t everything. However, anything that is quantitative has an expiration period to it, it is temporal.

Being in circumstances where you can feel it is easy to be happy and grateful, without defining happiness to material things, is for me it. It is qualitative happiness that is eternal and what everyone needs to achieve.

And so, this leads to my next story: “why is morality a part of true happiness?”