“I had to move to a new country with a small backpack” – sounds depressingly sad, doesn’t it? On the other hand, “how interesting it is that I packed up my documents and came to live in a cool new place” sounds like a real adventure. It’s just a description of the same event in my life, but “with a different sauce”. That’s the fun of it – how you describe to yourself what happens to you is how it is perceived.
You can live a life of sacrifice and hopelessness, or you can live everything that happens to you as a cool quest and fun experience. I want to feel sorry for myself, of course! How unlucky I am to have monetisation turned off. But you can see the new degrees of freedom that have emerged – I have created new sources of income on the ruins of my YouTube earnings that I had no idea about a year ago. It’s fantastic! When you rise from the ashes, even if it feels like “all is lost”.
Not to say that such experiences are always fun, because the very word “adventure” implies that the hero will face fear and horror, he will have to fight with a dragon, and eventually emerge victorious. Well, that’s what happens in fairy tales. But in life. If you get out somehow, you’re lucky. And there’s something to remember. Then you sit there and you get all chuffed, you get all puffed up. You remember this and that. How you fought with bureaucrats, how you searched for free food and how proud you were of yourself when you got a couple of shekels at the market.
My life just happens. The way it is. I can’t choose when a pandemic, a war, an economic crisis begins and ends. I can’t choose the time and place of the action. I may be the hero, but I’m not the hero of my novel. I’m here by chance. You can’t change the events of the world. You can’t kick a neighbour out of his flat, even if he’s noisy and smokes a lot. I can’t change the prices in the shops or change the sun to rain. But I’ve got something more important: the job I was born to do. And it’s called being happy.
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