If today, you’d make your life a party, what would your party be like?
Who would you invite? What would your party be about?
Parties could take many forms. You could invite a bunch of people and dance all night. You could have a party just by yourself. Your morning shower or breakfast could be a party. Meditating can be a nice party gift to yourself. Can finding the joy and love in every experience make life an everlasting party?
How many party moments do you really have on a given day?
If you’d go by the health statistics, you’d get the impression life isn’t a party for everyone.
Party spoilers.
Anything can happen on any day that can spoil your party. Bad weather. Power outage. Traffic. Out of money. Robbery. It’s always a choice if you’ll let it spoil your fun. The worse it seems to be, the more it is asking of you to be creative and resilient. Maybe you missed your flight, didn’t get the deal, lost a game, tripped over a stick, had to wait in line, ran out of gas - life is full of these potential spoilers. Have you ever taken a closer look at the mechanism that turns these moments into spoilers?
Let’s take missing a flight as an example. What makes that a spoiler of fun? You have planned something fun like a trip and now it’s going differently than you expected. If you look close at situations like this, you may find that often the source of the spoiling is in the tension between what you want and what is. You want it to be a certain way, and when it is not, tension arises.
In some people this tension rises more quickly than in others. In some people it doesn’t cause any tension at all. What does that tell us? The individual experience of the situation depends on the person. Therefore, the missing of the flight itself is not the spoiler. It is the experience you make out of it that makes it a spoiler or not. That is your choice entirely. When you missed the flight, you missed the flight. That is now a fact. How you deal with it seems to be your choice - and the possible responses are endless.
Some people may find this way of looking at life too easy or even nonsense. Someone is to blame. Something has been done to you. It is a too difficult and confrontational way to look at life. Perhaps that is their way out of having to take responsibility for their experiences.
When you have been given the diagnosis of cancer - it would be very justified to take that as a reason to feel terrible. Very few if any would find a way to have fun in that moment. The world around you will likely support you in that approach. That mentality may however also be the cause of your misery to continue. Cancer is not what you want - that’s clear. Now what do you do with it once it is there? It is considered inappropriate to say that you make your own cancer or that you should make the best of it - find the positive in it. Generally we seem to find it more comforting and acceptable to believe that it is done to us, without our own influence. However, no two people experience any situation the same way. You can make your own choice of what to do with it.
We tend to run away from the essence of a circumstance. It hurts too much to look it that closely. The unknown of the possible outcomes combined with the unexplained meaning of it, scares us. It reminds us of the unpredictability of life. Why would you want to look more closely at what you make of the experience and what the meaning may be?
It’s not necessarily that you simply should accept whatever comes your way and bounce with it. The mechanism of the resistance you feel when something is not going your way is there for a reason. Without it, you would have no direction in life. Think of a bowling lane for a kids party when they put bouncers in the gutters: when you throw the ball it will bounce its way to the end of its destination. The tension you experience when meeting a challenge is like those bouncers, or rubber band or magnet keeping you on your track. The art is to gain the flexibility to get to your destination independent of roadblocks. You could find incredible power within you when you do.
Perhaps missing the flight or being diagnosed with cancer, was outside your influence. Perhaps you can still find something of great value in that situation and discover a part of you that you didn’t know was there. Now that it is a fact, the question remains what do you make of it? Will it get the best or worst out of you?
Too harsh? Perhaps not. Feeling sorry for yourself or another could also mean denying the power that is in potential in all of us. That doesn’t mean it is easy and that we don’t need to care for and support those facing challenges. But going along in the drama may not be the most helpful. Keeping your own party going might.
Party poopers.
When ‘bad’ stuff happens, many will agree that it’s bad, and suck whatever joy there was left out of the situation in a heart beat. Even when nothing bad is happening and you are full of joy, they still may try to drag you down from your cloud of fun. They are the party poopers. They don’t want you to have any fun. They are stuck in their own drama - and they want you to join it. What is it in us that seeks the drama, even if there isn’t any apparent reason for it? What is this tendency to lean towards negativity? If I can’t have any fun, then you can’t. Or I want all the fun, and none for you. Or, if you are having fun, then what does that say about me?
Fear, shame, guilt, terror, lust, anger, resentment, greed, dependency, jealousy: some people seem to thrive on negative waves. It feeds something in us in some way. Perhaps the justification of being a victim. The approval for being lazy in facing life creatively and positively. Perhaps leaning on another feels easier or avoids having to face the responsibility for what we make of life. Or maybe we are still like a small child who doesn't want to share a toy and wants to keep it all to itself. Or maybe it’s just how we have come to understand life and we got stuck in the prison of drama.
It can also be that you made people come to your party, but they didn’t really want to come. There is always the chance that you assume everyone likes the same thing. To be a good party maker you need to know who likes what you like. Obligated fun is seldom fun.
Party blockers
A good night sleep can really change the mood. When you are exhausted or your body is aking and in pain - it can be challenging to have fun. You may not even have the idea of fun available to you when you are in that state - it’s a door not available in the room you are in. You first have to get to a place of more balance and health.
This makes it even harder to make something positive from a challenging situation. It’s not a time to party alone. You need some light to see the way out of the darkness. Emphasizing the darkness by going along in the drama isn’t going to help. Shining your own light will. It will help the other see his/her inner light sooner.
Don’t go along with the drama. Snap out of it. It’s only there to remind us of the possibility of a party - and you can choose to be the party maker in any moment of your day.
When you face a party pooper: say 'party pooper'. When you face a party blocker, face the light. When you face a party spoiler, acknowledge it and search for the creativity and power in you to get the party going again.