Distance yourself from those who thrive on maintaining their own misery

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt is a poetry and prose writer who has lived in Prince William County since 1999. She has published six books and is working on a seventh. Learn more about her at KatherineGotthardt.com, and follow her work on Facebook by searching #KatherinesCoffeehouse.

By Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt

What are you really looking for? When it comes down to it, most of us just want to be happy.

We have different ways of getting there, but at the base of it, enjoying life at some level is just plain attractive. Now, there are those folks out there who seem to thrive on maintaining their own misery.

I’m leaving them out of the discussion because I don’t think they are the norm. (And some of them, even though they act like they love being miserable, really don’t. They just think they don’t have other choice.)

Getting and staying inspired and motivated is one route to happiness.

But how?

The world can be a crappy place. There are social ills and war and nightmares beyond our imagination, some of them happening right in our backyards.

Let me tell you a story I heard a long time ago that I never forgot. I don’t even know where I heard it, but I know it was said to be a true story of a Holocaust survivor.  

A Jewish mother and her baby had been carted off in a train, destination Auschwitz. Now picture that. You’re young, you have an infant you love and need to care for, and you’re shoved into a cattle car. You only know where you’re going can’t be good.

She arrives to suffer all the horrors that we hear about—torture, humiliation, death, all of it surrounding her. Her baby cries and is murdered in an unthinkable way. She’s in utter darkness in every sense of the word.

And then one day, she finds a random flower petal on the ground in the camp. Just one, white, thin petal, probably from a wildflower. It has been trampled on, but it’s still fresh. She picks it up and puts it in her pocket. She touches it every day.

She puts it in her mouth at one point and sucks the flavor of the flower right out of it. Then she puts it back in her pocket. And that’s what keeps her alive.

Not possible, you think? It is if you’re focused on the petal, and that petal has meaning. It is if you’re grateful for a speck of beauty even amidst the ugliness. It is if you can believe that even in the darkness, there is a flicker of light waiting for you to notice.

It doesn’t get much worse than what that women went through. Call it faith, hope, God, Spirit, luck, chance, fate, absurdity—it’s the little things that can keep us motivated enough to keep going. But we have to look for them and focus on them.

If you want to be happy, stay motivated and inspired. To do that, seek out and focus on the right things, those things that work in favor of motivation and inspiration.

It’s not going to be easy. You will need help along the way.

Do the work. Accept the help. And when you’re in a better place, be the one to offer help.

You never know when you might be that petal, no matter your own condition.

These stories—

which of these

bring us to our knees,

which to our feet,

standing on tippy-toes,

stretching towards the sun?

Those are the ones

to read.

To remember.

Remember.

Until next time,

Katherine