Shahunshah wrote:
Their is only two principles I follow.
Pleasure and happiness is good, pain and suffering is bad. Everything we pursue must be to mitigate the latter in favor of the former, for us and the world around us. I think it gives me meaning.
I'm different. For many years I worked with damaged and traumatized horses. It was hard work. It was often frustrating, not the horses, but that all their problems came from stupid humans. I lost count of how many bones I broke being kicked and thrown. I was stood on, run over, bitten and even chased out of paddocks by the really angry ones. As I said, it was hard work but I always believed it was worthwhile. That's what gave my life meaning. I was doing something I believed in. I think believing what you are doing is worthwhile is more important than happiness. Happiness is fleeting. It's nice but never a permanent state. A sense of commitment to what you are doing, a belief that it's meaningful, gets you through the long, difficult and sometimes disappointing interludes between the happy bits.
For me, starting with a horse that could only be caught by running them into a small yard and gradually building trust to the point where I could walk up to them in a paddock and halter them and then months later having the horse see me coming and it comes running up to the gate to be haltered, those breakthroughs were the happy bits but the work inbetween the breakthroughs was often a tough slog. The belief in the meaningfulness was what sustained me.
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I have a piece of paper that says ASD Level 2 so it must be true.