The best plan is no plan – Personal happiness and balance

Once again, it’s been a while since I posted, partly because I feel that I should write only when I feel like writing something – this isn’t a job and I’m certainly not being paid to do it! It’s simply a channel through which to play out thoughts in my mind, and work through ideas that keep bugging me.
One thing that’s bugged me this year has been that this year hasn’t quite turned out how I planned it. This will have been my third year since I decided to focus more on happiness rather than financial success, and I thought it was going to be the best year as I had an idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it! Unfortunately work (and karma I guess) decided otherwise, schedules didn’t align, my body didn’t want to play ball. I’ve had a lot of big, life-shifting moments this year – visiting Nepal and falling in love with the culture, where I also climbed my first 6000m peak and opened up a world of possibilities to the higher ranges. I also volunteered in Nepal for the first time in my life, which has created massive moral conflicts within me and is the subject that I want to talk about today.
Before I volunteered, I was happy on my journey to personal happiness. I was discovering more and more about myself, and becoming more aware of what I truly loved and enjoyed. I was meeting new people who were opening my mind to Buddhist ideas and concepts of enlightenment, and I was reading inspiring books that were helping to guide me towards someone who I wanted to be. I’d repeatedly read that ‘personal happiness isn’t selfish, it’s necessary’ and so I often found myself fighting to do the things that I understood I loved, putting MY personal happiness above all else. In short, I’d missed the point. Yes personal happiness is incredibly important; both spiritually AND scientifically if you are a happy individual then you will have greater compassion and kindness to others, or in hippie words ‘you send good vibrations out into the cosmos’, and happiness is incredibly infectious.
After I’d volunteered though, my climbing, my mountain ambitions, my wanderlust (I hate that term btw) seemed trivial, selfish, shameful even. It brought me to a new level of awareness, what was I doing to help the world? Ok yes maybe I was sending out good vibes, but I could definitely be doing more. I wanted to do more and I believed I could. So I worked out how much I really needed to live on, bought a new van (not sure if I mentioned it but my old one died in Finale Ligure last year) and set out my plan to work while doing my climbing/mountain thing on evenings and weekends and then to head out to the next volunteering project and give back to the world (and do a bit of travelling) until my visa/money ran out. A good plan I thought, in principle, but as I mentioned earlier – the universe thought otherwise.
Instead this year has been about humility, developing a greater understanding of my motivations, and a whole lot of questions in general! At some point someone suggested a book to me – Three Cups of Tea – and it turned my dreams upside down and inside out. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it – basically a mountaineer attempts to summit K2 (second highest mountain in the world and incredibly dangerous), fails and loses the rest of his party. He stumbles into a small mountain village who look after him and nurse him back to health. He finds out they have no school and vows to come back to build them one…and ended up building some 600 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s pretty inspirational…
So what does it mean to me? And how does it affect what I want to get out of life? Climbing for me was (still is actually) an activity that allows me to move into the flow state, to be present in the moment, to actively meditate, to be happy. I do still think it has a huge place in my life, but something bigger is now in my consciousness. By helping others and practising kindness and compassion, that will also cultivate happiness. I guess, as usual, the answer is all about balance…
“It’s never too late to start over. If you weren’t happy with yesterday, try something different today. Don’t stay stuck. Do better.”