Power and unhappiness

I’ve come to the conclusion that unhappy people are really powerful people who are afraid to use their power.

Unhappy people think they are powerless, but deep down they know they are not.

Truly powerless people are actually happy. Truly powerless people know that their role in life is to be powerless, and they’re content with this. We’ve all seen examples, from the completely powerless (a homeless man on the street who seems equally happy whether you give him money or not) to the people content with limited power (a bank teller who serves you happily with no thoughts of becoming a manager one day).

Ours is a results-oriented society. We are encouraged to be high-achievers. We like it when we’ve accomplished big, important things: having a meaningful career, having a spouse or children who makes us a proud, having enough money to feel secure. We don’t like ‘low achievers’.

There are two kinds of these so-called ‘low achievers’ – the happy ones and the unhappy ones. You see both every day. It’s got nothing to do with what they do. There’s the clerk at the post office who goes about things with no fuss, and the clerk who makes a big deal of helping you, as if to say, this is not an easy job, there’s a lot to do, you just don’t know. There’s the ‘housewife’ mother who loves her household chores, and there’s the irritable one who actually isn’t doing a very good job because she’s half-hearted at it, distracted by these vague thoughts that say, ‘I’m better than this’.

Some ‘low achievers’ are meant to be such, whereas others are only such because they haven’t used their power. They will seem helpless and unhappy, desperate and lost.Their unhappiness is actually their intuition telling them about the great power that is theirs. Unhappiness is just one consequence of fear, and remember that fear is always a breadcrumb leading towards home, a signpost on the journey saying which direction to head in. If they head in the direction of their fear, they’d find the place where they’ve hidden their power from themselves. Their only choice is whether or not to follow that intuition. Their intuition is telling them to accept that they are powerful.

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And so use that power. And realize that every time you use it, the world changes – because this is what power does. And when the world changes, it becomes an unknown thing that you will have to face. It will no longer be the comfortable world that you knew. And that’s really why you feared using your power in the first place, isn’t it?

The alternative is to not use your power. But that’s what you’ve been doing all these years: you chose not to use it. This simply resulted in your feeling unfulfilled, unhappy, angry and frustrated. And you took out your frustration on yourself and those around you, didn’t you? That was just bottled-up power bubbling over. Power is not meant to be contained. You have been pushing your power into a corner and choosing not to think about it. But all energy is meant to flow; when you try to constrain it, it becomes dangerous – an entire solar system of energy pushed into a small space and forgotten. It will leak out; and when it does, it comes out spectacularly. Not just every time you have a temper tantrum or speak a harsh word, but also every time you are depressed, every time you feel empty – that is your energy flashing out of you.

It takes energy to feel empty, you ask? Yes, it does. It takes energy to create a vacuum. Vacuums aren’t meant to exist. It takes power to make a space so empty that it has no air, no love, no cheer. All these things naturally permeate everything, so to keep it all out, it takes power. That’s what your power has been used to make. You created emptiness and sadness; it is proof that you are powerful.

So, when you feel such terrible things as emptiness and sadness, jump with joy. Be happy and celebrate, because you have found out what your power has been up to. Then choose again. Choose to consciously use your power in a different way. Not to keep out air and light and sustenance, but to guide the flow of air and light and sustenance. You controlled all this before, so control it all now. Just choose not to keep them out. Choose not to do what you used to do. You used to drive all of it into certain things, making a towering, powerful thing of it. A towering, powerful frustration. A towering, powerful loneliness. A towering, powerful anger. You made these things out of air and light and sustenance. Now make something else with them.

Lyle Chan