My mom responded to the entire divorce in a way that made us respect her on a whole new level. Some of us lose our minds when we get upset and lose sight of what’s important to us—but not my mom. She was definitely hurt and upset, but she wasn’t angry or vindictive. She never once thought my dad was a terrible person for what he’d done. For my mom, what my dad did was painful, but she believed that only she could choose whether or not to suffer. To her, being angry would be to suffer, and she didn’t want that. Her priority was her happiness and the happiness of her children—not what my dad did or didn’t do.
We’d known our mom to be kind and extremely wise from the way she raised us. People usually show us who they are when they have to go through a difficult time, and through our parents’ divorce, we kept seeing evidence of our mom’s kindness and wisdom.
When my dad was in the process of moving out from our house, my mom helped him pack. My dad wanted more time, but my mom was very firm about him moving out within a week, and she saw that the process would go more quickly if she helped with the packing.
My brother and I watched with complete fascination—and a little dismay—as she packed my dad’s clothes neatly into boxes, even going so far as to label them. My brother objected to my dad taking anything other than his clothes, but unbeknownst to us at the time, my mom had given my dad a set of kitchen utensils and cutleries for his new place. It wasn’t just one plate and a spoon, fork, and knife—it was a set of six!—because, “What if he had guests over?” Our jaws dropped when she told us this years later.
“Even in the movies you don’t see people doing that!” my brother exclaimed. At the time, we both protested that my mom was being too nice to my dad. “People usually just throw everything into garbage bags and dump them outside!” I pointed out, exasperated.
It was as if we had to remind my mom that she was the victim here!
And then it really hit me—why would we want my mom to think that she was a victim, when she didn’t see herself as one?
It does not take strength to hate someone, it takes strength to be kind to them even when they have done you a bad turn. My mom wasn’t forcing herself to be nice or kind, she has always been a nice and kind person—while my mom certainly didn’t think that my dad respected her in his actions, she respected herself enough not to behave in a way that was beneath her standards. Just because someone had been unkind did not mean she had to also be unkind. My mom saw no reason to let a negative experience change her for the worse.
Through the entire divorce process, my mom wasn’t controlling or suppressing her emotions. She felt all sorts of emotions, but she did the same thing she had been practicing all her life whenever she was upset—she let go of the feeling. Ever since I can remember, my mom has always been someone who believes that anger solves nothing and creates more suffering. My dad may have left, but my mom did not let that change her for the worse or make her bitter.
Often, when marriages end and one parent blames the other, it makes it very difficult for the kids to be happy because they feel like they have to be just as angry as a show of support to the injured party. But because of the classy and graceful way my mom handled my dad’s affair and the divorce, my brother and I didn’t see it as something negative or bad.
In fact, it was incredibly inspiring to bear witness to how my mother handled this difficult time in her life. She had always taught me to be happy, but through her own actions, I could actually see what non-suffering meant. From the very beginning, my mom accepted the reality of what was happening without going down the path of “How could you?!” or “Why me?” In the absence of blame or self-pity, my mom suffered very little, if at all.
My mom has shown me what it truly means to be a strong person.
People can always cause us pain, but we truly can choose not to suffer. We can value our happiness so much that even when people hurt us, we don’t have to give our happiness away.
We Can Always Choose, but Never Control, Our Happiness
<Acceptance>
Most of us know that happiness goes beyond a feeling—that happiness is a choice. However, sometimes we just don’t feel good despite wanting to make the choice to be happy. Sometimes we wake up feeling depressed or anxious, and the knowledge that happiness is a choice can make us feel even more depressed because we feel that we have failed in some way. We feel even more frustrated at our inability to make the choice to be happy.
But here is what is important to understand—making a choice is not as the same as having control. One of the main reasons we feel frustrated at not being able to be happy is because we think our happiness is something we can control.
The problem with trying to control our lives and how we feel is that we will rarely or never succeed, because we cannot control what happens to us, and to a great extent, we cannot control how we feel. Our emotions are tied to good news and bad news, likes and dislikes, love and pain. To say that we shouldn’t feel a certain way is to deny our humanity. Every emotion we feel is part of being human. To be human with grace, we need to accept that we are full of thoughts, ideas, and emotions that make us capable of extreme greatness as well as incredible sorrow.
Life takes us where it wants to take us, and the best thing we can do for ourselves is to make the choice to influence, to steer, to drive it—but we can only do that if we’re not fighting against our own thoughts and our emotions.
When people talk about the secret of happiness, they’re not talking about how we can constantly feel pleasure and elation, but how we can be in a state of contentment and peace. To be at peace is to look all the bad things fully in the face and say, “I’m not going to fight you.”
When we feel we need to protect ourselves, our instincts are always to resist. We feel that resisting means we are not giving up. But it’s in fact the opposite—resisting what we feel makes it even harder to be happy, because we are constantly feeling guilty for feeling bad. In a way, the unwillingness to accept how we feel means we are rejecting ourselves over and over again, making it very hard for us to see the value of our lives.
This is where all of us have to know that accepting our own negativity, sadness, or depression is not giving up. Giving acceptance to ourselves is giving kindness. It’s giving understanding. It’s not saying, “You ruined your own life because you can’t feel happy.”
Acceptance is saying, “It’s okay, breath by breath, you can try again tomorrow.”
All of us have experienced moments of deep sadness and negativity; we have days where we feel down without any real reason why. If we can be kind to ourselves during these moments instead of being frustrated at ourselves, it’s already a step forward.
What’s so crucial for us to understand is that moving forward in life isn’t about never taking steps backwards. Sometimes we move three steps forward and five steps back. It can be incredibly frustrating because we feel like we’ve tried so hard to climb up, only to slide back down again. But that’s not failing, that’s simply living.
We understand that no one is perfect, so why are we so hard on ourselves during the times when we are not perfect?
So often, we think that we must control our emotions. We must control our lives. But control is only an illusion—that’s why our efforts to control almost always backfire and we end up feeling worse. In life, we cannot control how we feel or how things happen, but we have absolute power over the way we respond to them.
Choosing happiness is not about controlling our emotions—it’s not suddenly going from feeling sad to feeling happy the next moment. When we choose happiness, it means we understand that the value of our lives is never defined by how we feel at that moment.
We don’t look at people who are unhappy and think that their lives are worth less. Don’t just practice kindness toward others, and don’t learn to only love others. When we practice accepting the entirety of what