WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

When you look back upon your life, do you feel that you have been on an emotional roller coaster, with intervals of calm (when things were approximately fine and you felt approximately balanced), inevitably followed by inexplicable emotional lows and confidence decline, when everything seemed to fall apart, for no evident reason? And in those low moments, you couldn't seem to make any sense of life, the world and your own role in this complicated movie.

You find yourself feeling so deeply vulnerable, drifting, like a leaf in a whirlpool, fighting for direction, yearning for stability and quickly losing hope and your ability to trust yourself and the life around you.

This is true for what my life was, several years back.

I used to think joy, happiness, as well as enthusiasm, are either traits we are born with, or things that happen to us, at times and during circumstances I had no control over. I was fairly good at feigning confidence and optimism, but in reality I only had some random ideas on how to feel happy. None of these ideas were reliable, though, to produce happiness or at least a feeling of safety at predictable times, or when I needed them most. Also, if I happened to run across the big H, happiness, I had no idea how to make it last a bit longer, or how to enhance it, to feel it stronger.

While I had quite long intervals of positive in my career, relationships and emotional life- and apparently everything important was going on pretty well, I wasn't always able to see, to realize, to contemplate the goodness of it all, to take it all in and to actually enjoy it consistently. I would easily allow my focus to flow towards worrisome or fearful thoughts and I would eventually find myself again in a deep pit of discouragement, low confidence, pessimism and sadness.

And every time I found myself in this state again, I would curse my bad fortune and desperately wonder what was so fundamentally wrong with me? Was I inherently damaged in some dark, inexplicable way? "Why can't I just be fine with what I have, why all this internal turmoil? Will I ever, ever be all right - for good, or at least for a long, long time?"

I secretly started to believe I was a lost cause, damaged goods. I would cry against life and whoever made it all so hard to figure out, and I would once again lose trust and hope in my ability to ever be happy.

This all seemed to be complicated furthermore by the lack of a proper life map, some sort of clearly designed and explained guidance-answers about why we are here, what is the purpose of this world and my existence in it? What is of utmost importance, in our daily interactions, as well as for our entire lifespan?

What is the best way to live our lives? In accordance to whose definition of "best"?

I didn't seem to have a framework to refer to, in so many areas of my life – or the framework I had was not enabling me to stay consistently happy and confident. Quite the contrary. And this often left me feeling frustrated, discouraged and utterly out of control. Like a lost little fish, swimming through the random waves of a river, with no vision about its destination, and no power to make its way across the troubled, unpredictable waters.

You'd expect humanity to have come up with a clear, condensed and explicit manual for living by now.

You'd expect so many billions of lives and deaths to have been enough motivation for someone to finally step up and put together the whole puzzle, to select what matters most and make it understandable to even the most unsophisticated reader. So that the next generations don't have to wander around blindly, just like their ancestors before them, starting from the same starting line, reaching for the same known finish, trying to learn roughly the same lessons, going through the same tragedies, chasing the same illusions, making the same mistakes and living in the same haze and confusion, over and over again.

In fact, the truth and the answers have always been entirely available to us at all times, some in all the amazing books out there, some come through personal experience, mentors or –most powerfully – through pure, direct inspiration.

Often, however, you just feel like it will take forever to figure it all out. When we read a book, for example, (even the holy ones), the coins finally start to drop only by the third or fourth reading (if ever!). The language and examples are no longer adequate for our times, and those who offer to interpret them for you have their own human biases, beliefs and agendas, and this could just sink you further down in fear, guilt and shame. Not what you need.

You may run across people, relationships and events that throw you far, far away from your track, and confuse you even more. Or you get busy with life and lose track of your findings. You forget how much you wanted to find these answers. Until you hit the wall again. And let's be honest, when you're deep in the dark pit you rarely feel like reading one more book.

What on Earth are we supposed to do, then?

Wouldn't you wish you had a map? A little book that spells the rules of the game of life in very simple terms? Someone to connect the dots for you - not all of them, but at least enough dots to get yourself out of the pit forever and set in the right direction, with a working, understandable, applicable, easy to decipher recipe for happy life.

I had desperately yearned for, and searched for the same. Not that I was able to even formulate this need in my mind until a later stage, but I often felt like a stranger in the wrong movie. I felt that reality as I saw it just didn't make enough sense and there were many, too many pieces of my puzzle missing.

So I kept digging and searching, ever more frustrated. This feeling of being a misfit in a weird world was only getting stronger as I was growing up and facing all the hardships of the world – this is what we are taught: you have to grow up and take in all the fear, injustice and tough times of humanity and make them all your own. Toughen up. What a bunch of nonsense! That is humanly impossible, without tearing yourself...