Life is about giving Joy a taking pain - 6

Perceived Pain vs Actual Pain :

Lets understand what our brain is.
Our brain is the most sophisticated computer that is known to us.It processes information , stores information and also controls standard bodily functions required for a human to stay alive. Its also has the task that make sure survival of the body at any cost. Its also one of the computer unlike any one which we have ever invented which adds new memory and processing capability as needed and if not needed or it slowly sheds any additional capability or memory which it has at its disposal. So its a adaptable computer to the environment and utilization. Just like any other computer it has a temporary memory like RAM which stores information that is very relevant very recently need and another memory that may be needed but has not been used recently but may be needed in future and on top of it it can create additional capacity. This temporary memory which is similar to RAM in computer is the subconscious mind that controls something which does not need to be processed differently every time as the end results and the factors that drive the end results have a very similar pattern. In fact the inputs and outputs are so similar the process that goes in to affect the desired outcome does not even get registered in the memory for a long time. For example when you are learning to drive a car you have to always look for each of the functions like accelerator and break and the road among other things . But think if you have been driving the same road for more than 10 year ; you can literally do not have to think at all while driving in that road. Similarly someone who is typing for the first time will have to look for the letters but for a expert  in typing will not even have to look towards the keyboard at all. So if you like to mastery anything you would have to practice so long that you create a new neural pathway which will make the whole affair effortless.

Its so hard to start a new thing and practice over a period of time as you do not have a dedicated neural pathway for that action but once its created you do not have to do a thing. Humans and for that matter all the living creatures are organic beings and the most important distinction of something organic is the ability to change both internally and externally based on the need to cater to a different situation. So the most important thing that someone can learn to master in anything is learn to practice until a neural pathway is build. The practice can be a actual practice but as all the calculation that is done in the brain itself a mental practice has been experimentally show to be as effective. There is experiment with the group of basketball players who are asked to practice and another group asked to not practice physically but only practice mentally making the throw and its observed that the group that just did the throw mentally also improved as much as the group which practiced. So this confirms the notion that making the new neural pathways are the most vital part in making an habit real.

But have you ever thought how a pain is actually created ; its nothing but a response of your brain which interpret something or some stimulus is harmful for you as a whole. So that means that its not something which is rather it is something that is interpreted as. This is the key. As we know interpretation of something can be wrong in many ways ; and this is true in our perception of pain as well. This is usually something that is correct in terms of physical pain or discomfort. If you cut yourself bad in a knife as a child you would automatically try to avoid touching a knief. This is the type which is helpful and protects us and can be treated as positive pain interpretation.Even though this can sometimes lead to limitation when you grow up as you would have something associated in your brain and you no longer need to be associated any longer as you have grown enough to handle the knife. But the other type of pain that we will focused on here is the mental pain which cripples a person much more than a physical pain can ever be. Think of a situation in your childhood where you needed to speak on a podium in front of a group of other students in your school and you fumbled and stumbled and you gasped for breath and after you are done your fellow students ridiculed you about it for few days. Now you talked to yourself public speaking is stupid and you are not going to do it ever again. This is something which exactly happened with me in a very early age in kindergarten school when I was supposed to speak on a podium on the occasion of teachers day and I fumbled and wrongly told that today is children's day and all the kids laughed aloud. That made me more nervous and made me gasping for breadth and I could not really finish my whole speech well which I had prepared for many days earlier. That made me tell myself that public speaking is bad and I tried to avoid public speaking for many year to come until just a few years back when I started slowly to realize my limiting belief and started working on it. Its not easy to create a new belief but it is possible with diligent efforts and unyielding practice. All you would need to do is to go back to the earlier experience which it all started and replace the negative outcome to a much more positive outcome, and then practice the same thoughts over and over until you firmly believe in the thought you want to instill in yourself. This is the reason why there is no medicine that is effective for psychological conditions like Post Traumatic stress Disorder(PTSD) or anxiety or depression. As brain is mostly a pattern matching instrument which work through images not words or language some images or stimuli can cause excruciating pain as brain will associate the images to an memory or an event that is extremely painful. There is no easy way out of this as this is basically an association mechanism that is your brain is very adopted to. To avoid to be in this trap is to get yourself practice over and over again to visualize and stimulate the same images but now associate an different feeling to it. At first the brain will resist , react , revolt but eventually after too many repetitions it will eventually succumb to the new conditioning. The key here is repetition. But another key is emotion.

Life is about giving Joy a taking pain - 5

Feeling Connected : Joy

By now you might have guessed what I mean Joy could be different than happiness. Actually it is. You can manifest happiness at will but joy is something you will have to strive. Some people many be just be content with the happiness and there is nothing wrong in it. But we are not here in this planet just to be happy we all have a much higher purpose. Think as if all your fingers have some kind of feeling and feeling and it found a way to be happy and content and did not participate in the purpose of holding a object in your hand. Would it fulfill its higher purpose. We all come to this earth with a after a lot of struggle and suffering and we all have a higher purpose. We all are part of a much bigger consciousness and we are just offshoot of those consciousness. So our goal can not just be happy our goal is to gain eternal bliss which is sometimes refereed in eastern philosophies as "Mokshya" which you can only strive towards your higher purpose. We are going to talk about in future parts. Now what is a higher purpose. To understand a higher purpose we need to understand what we actually are. Now no one in this world truly and fully understand what are are. If you talk to a scientist or a person from medical field.He will say we are a biological living organism who is adopted into the environment of planet earth and we have manifested through millions of years of evolution. Which started as a single cellular organism in a warm soupy ocean in the earth to a multi cellular organism like a fish and reptile or bird or mammals and finally to monkeys to us. They are actually correct in ways. If you ask a theologian , depending on which religion he follows he will tell god created this universe in 7 days and in the 7th day he created a male and female Adam and Eve who then in turn created us. Now he is no incorrect either. If you take into account gods days could be much different than us as time is relative so we can not scientifically refute that its not correct. Some scientist may argue what... we have evidence of  evolution we have fossil records of things evolving. Now to that point I would say lot of things in the theology are not meant to be interpretative of  a detailed record of fact because it deliberately misses the details. There is no written documentation of what God did to create the world. Now its like a parable of three blind men where all of them went to a elephant and one hold it legs and said an elephant is like a tree trunk and the second went in and he hold its trunk and said its like a fire hose made with rubber and the third man went and hold the ear and said its a like a think piece of leather. Now how can a elephant be three radically different things ; are they all wrong . No in fact they are all correct. When a concept or something is much bigger than the observer which we are at this case there will be multiple version of fact and they could be all correct. Take an example we being the most intelligent species on the planet and earth being the only place we known , but still for thousands of year we have been believing the earth is flat as its so much order of magnitude bigger than anything in our experience we never had a clue how can we stand and not fall over on anything that is spherical. It took us to create telescope and look at the other planets and then do some real convincing to get to the point that earth actually being spherical and being an enormous size than us we do not fall over and it appears flat to us. Similarly think as if you are an ant climbing on an Eiffel tower would would have any clue what is the shape of the tower. The only way to understand anything by any real means we would have disassociate that thing from the observer and then try to understand from a disassociated point of view. Now how would we disassociate from life without being in heaven to observer the life to understand it. We can not by any known means. So if we can not be certain of it then it may be in our best interest to use any hypothesis if that gives us some desirable result and ignore any hypothesis that takes us away from desirable result.

Now some scientist may say the biological purpose of any living organism are here in earth is to survive and reproduce. Now if you look closely survival and reproduction are very inter related. We are indeed surviving by reproducing among other ways of survival mechanism we have like healing , immunity and regeneration. So is that it. In a way it is. But there is something special which we have only within us that make us different than may be a something that is not living. That is consciousness which could be the key to understanding the life. We all including all animals have consciousness and we are aware of our existence. But the only reason I will exclude animals for this discussion as their consciousness is little less developed than humans , that does not mean they are not totally off limit from discussion of the topic. So all humans basically share a type of realization of existence that is consciousness which is the connective source in human. Its like all leaf of the  tree are connected by the tree sap that flows among all of them making them all part of the same tree. However for a moment think as if you are a leaf you have a independent existence and you feel as if you a different from other leafs. Which is actually true as you born and die as a leaf which has a different cycle from the other leafs however if you only realize you are a leaf and you will do everything to make sure you as a leaf will survive and thrive without any realization that you are part of a bigger thing called a tree you are probably leaving not up to the bigger purpose. There is no denying the fact that we have our own will and choice which could be different. However if a cell or a leaf only focuses on thriving and reproduce taking all the resources of the plant or an organism it will just grow into a cancerous tumor and ultimately end up in catastrophe not just for the entire part of the growth but may be for the entire organism itself. So its very critical to feel the higher connection and realize that just like a single leaf we are part of a tree and to be healthy and fulfilled the tree as a whole has to be healthy and fulfilled.  Now you may say I am such a small part and I do not think I can really contribute in a meaningful way. Have you thought if every leaf in a plant thinks the same and don't contribute to the plant for food utilizing photosynthesis then the whole plant might slowly decay and weaken and then die ultimately killing the leaf as well. So the first thing to do is to realize that we are part of a higher consciousness which includes every type of consciousness from a small living organism like a fish or a small shrub to bigger life forms like whale. We are all connected through a single thread which is consciousness even though we do not realize them. So first thing we would need to do to feel the joy and bliss is to share a sense of empathy towards all living creatures as if they are the leaves of the same tree we are part of. Once we have build the empathy for everyone we will slowly realize the connected link that we have long lost and share the same energy that flows through the collective consciousness. Once we get connected to everyone and every living organism we will slowly share all the pleasure that any living organism share like you can be delighted to see a squirrel jumping from a tree to tree holding a nut or a rabbit munching a carrots as if its the first carrot he has ever eaten. You will also feel the same for other people and share their pleasure. And moreover this realization and practice of the realization will liberate you from the smaller daily setbacks.

Life is about giving Joy a taking pain - 4

Feeling Connected : Joy

Now you know how to invoke your best feeling in a single instance at will at any time. The next important thing is practice. Its all about practice in life. Humans or any living being are so beautiful creation we lose what we do not practice so that we can gain what we practice. Actually living beings are like play dough the colorful clay that kids play with making them in different shapes and sizes. Once we become something we are no longer the old thing until we get back to the old thing. We have potential to be anything but we are only one thing at any point of time. For example you can not be happy and sad at the same time. You can not be calm and angry at the same time. You can not be anxious and blissful at the same time or you can not be at pain and at ease at the same time.

So what make a person in some way or the other. Its Habit. We are what we habitually do. Think about you may have been a great skate boarder when you are a child and you have not been skateboarding for a while , most likely you would not skateboard as well as you could do earlier. That is because you only have a limited amount of bandwidth in your immediate subconscious mind which is what directs yous day to day life. For example if you brush everyday before going to bed and you have been doing that try going to bed without brushing; probably you would not even have a good sleep that day. So the key is practice. Our mind is always practicing whether you like it or not.We either practice a good thing that makes you feel good or if we do not do it we by default practice something negative. Actually there is nothing which is really negative , which is a really a very controversial topic that we may touch later. You either practice something that is productive that pulls your towards your goal or enhances your capability in ways you desire, or you do not practice something productive or towards happiness. Think about your life is ship that is travelling towards a specific port. This analogy is not entirely correct as it never stops when the port is reached. But for easy understanding lets consider this. You are in the high seas and you need to travel north continuously to reach your destination port so you would need to make sure every day or every hour its headed toward north ; but what happens when you lose your direction or compass. Now you do not have a direction in your ship and the ship will wonder around in the high seas rather than heading towards your goal or destination. Now you let it roam around for a week and after a week comeback and check how much closer your ship from the destination port and you would just get frustrated, then still you did do anything to make the ship heading in the right direction and then you come back after a month to see  how closer your ship is from the destination port , you may be even more frustrated it may  be even farther when you started your journey. So its very important to keep a very close eye on the direction of your ship or life and make every possible step every possible time to guild it in the right direction. Now this is a common mistake in Humans. We always do not get our ships in control and our mind may say you have been doing this for a full week now, take some rest and chill. Its boring persevere doing it every day each day take a break and indulge in something you love to do , do some party , drink some beers , your destination is not going away you have done so much steering your ship in the right direction. Now all these indulgences are nothing but something that leaves your ships direction in disarray. Think you are in a cruise ship and the captain has been guiding towards a port and he decided to party for a few hours without making sure to leave someone a the helm. Keeping the same thing every day could be monotonous but its what you become as part of the journey that matter. If you would like to indulge in something make sure you have planned what would you do to make up for the lost time or lost motivation. You need to practice something or some way you would like to make as a habit as many times as possible until the habit is ingrained in who you are.   Once it becomes ingrained into your identity or your own reflection you do not have to get any motivation to do it rather the habit itself will motivate you to continue with the habit. So its very important to make sure which habits you want and which you do not. As per a recent study we need to practice something 66 days straight to make it a habit. So I will recommend to practice at least 4-5 times a day for 66 days straight. I know its not a trivial task but having a eternal happiness at will is not trivial either.  

Life is about giving Joy a taking pain - 3

Feeling Connected : Joy

What is the human nature. Human nature is basically to being your current state of inertia unless you get some kind of external impact.  Just sit back and think if you are who you are and you have nothing to do , nothing to prove and nothing to be what you would rather do. Would you be calm , probably yes. Would you be poised and complete ; probably yes. But there is always a big but why does almost all people are never calm and poised. Its so simple to achieve. Because you will really have a hard time to control your emotions , and thoughts as just like your heart its a continuous process and never stops. You can not have a single thoughts for 2 mins unless you practice meditation and the brain has all you emotions stored in a single space and even if you think you control your thoughts you do not. Unless your brain stores similar thoughts in a single place and organizes it in a correct order you can not control your thoughts. At this moment when I am writing this I am thinking 10 different things like I need to work on my typing skills , my communication skills needs improvement , I need to fill out that form which I am procrastinating for so many days and so on.. Sometimes you would also have contradicting thoughts as they are also stored in the same places in your brain and because there is a connecting piece they are even more closely connected. So how would you really isolate your thoughts , there is only one way available as far as I know to make your brain organized. That is meditation. Just like if your desk is really not organized when you are looking for something you can not easily and quickly get it without really taking a long time  or messing up your who desk or you have 100 file on your desk without any specific order or in any specific way.Then to get to a specific file you would have to juggle through a lot of the files before getting to the file you have been looking for. We have a lot of sensory inputs like touch, taste , see, smell and hear which feed to our experience and makes our memory. These inputs together make our specific memory or feeling so if we would like to make a memory the more number of sensory inputs we associated something with the better. Think you have met with your person of dreams and he/she is exactly how you had imagined. You want to a calm beach resort restaurant in the first date and where there was salty smell of ocean with warm sand and you were tasting a exquisite red wine holding their hand while the waves are breaking on the shore while you feel the soft sand on your feet with a full moon glistening over the ocean. How likely you would forget this encounter. Probably never. And if at any point of time you would like to go back to that exact moment in your imagination how difficult would it be? probably not very difficult. Because you have every type of sensory input associated with the event noted in your brain and to find that exact feeling you just need to enact or remember one of the sensory inputs. Ever wondered why if you have a special cologne which you wore in your cruise vacation last year and whenever you wore it it reminds you of the vacation time and you feed good about it and it becomes your favorite cologne. Lets take an example where you got a dictionary where all the words are stored in a random order and you are looking for a single word how difficult would it be. Probably you would need at least few hours to get to the word if you do not give up finding the word in between. But think its a dictionary where all words are sorted and organized and you are looking for a word and you also know exactly which page the word is.And also on top of it any word in that dictionary is color coded green for positive connotation , red for negative connotation and yellow for neutral connotation. Now how long would it take to find the exact words. Probably within a min at max. This is the power of indexing and sorting anything. This is also applicable for your brain power.
Now you may be thinking why I have been talking so different things that are not connected to joy. But actually they are. If you need to experience joy first you would have to remember its not outside situation that make you feed joy or sad. Its your internal response that make it. Now if you would like to control your thoughts or move away from a negative thoughts to a joyous one. You need to first create a joyous situation it does not matter if its in real or in your mind. Then associate as many sensory inputs that you can associate with that joyous thought.Then feed the same sensory inputs in a periodic manner and contemplate the thoughts to make that feeling reside in your immediate memory rather than in distant memory. Then make a habit to invoke the exact sensory inputs to recreate the situation in your mind at will or in a periodic manner or when you realize you are not feeling joyous.

Now lets take an example to make the whole thing little more simple. Suppose you want to be always to be happy in spite of the situation. Now as I said earlier feeling joy or sorrow is a response to any situation ; that means you can create the feeling of joy at will in any situation. Or you can create the feeling of meditation in your work schedule even while you are in meeting. Here is a step by step approach..

Step 1.  Create a great joyous situation may be in real or in your mind.

For example.  Take a wonderful vacation to a pacific island with a magnificent beach with your spouse and kids.Lets think you went to to your own island Fiji and you are in your private beach front mansion. You and your spouse are walking on this delicate soft white sand while the cool green waves touching your feet and making you a feeling of cool sensation while you have this feeling of warm sands .While your kids are playing on the sand and making a sand castle. You are now feeling the a cool breeze with a salty oceanic smell that is coming through beautiful and fragrant flowers making a salty floral vibe.You are also hearing to the soft tweeting sound of of a wonderful variety of birds coming from the jungle near the beach and the breaking of the waves on the shore making it a delectable music to your ears. Now you have got yourself a little fruit salad with tropical fruits like Pinapple , Mango , Passion Fruit with a refreshing and sweet coconut water. You are thinking at this time " Life is heavenly "  watching the jade green water of the ocean where you can see all the colorful tropical fish swimming in the water.

Step 2.  Note all the sensory inputs here.
Smell:   The smell of a salty breeze with the aroma of tropical flower and fruits with coconot
Sound:  Ocean waves Breaking. Birds chirping.
Vision:  Jade green water.Warm White Sands. Deep blue Sky.
Touch:   Soft powdery Feeling of the warm sand. Cool Breeze. Cool wave breaking on feet.
Taste:    Cool and subtle coconut.  Sweet and slightly sour taste of tropical fruits like pineapple and mango
Thoughts: Heavenly. Calm. Relaxed. Blissful.

Step 3: Recreate the heavenly feeling at will at any time.
Smell: The easiest part recreating this feeling is through the smell. Get a cologne with salty oceanic vibe and fruity and coconut notes. Or you can add more than one cologne to make this smell. Do not use this as your daily wear.  Spray this special cologne in a handkerchief and have that in your pocket.
Sound: Have a music in your smart phone with sounds of Ocean waves , Birds Chirping and soft breeze blowing
Vision : Surround yourself with paintings of a beautiful island of your dream and you  pictures taken in the island in any way possible but not at places where you will have to see them every time you open it. May be in your wallet. But little away from every days things otherwise you will fall into having that picture as being the cliche.
Touch: This is the toughest part. Have a special stress ball which is having sandy and soft texture. Sqeeze it when you like to recreate the feeling
Taste:  Have a chewing gum with tropical fruit. Or have a tropical trail mix with dried coconut chunks and tropical fruit.

Life is about giving Joy a taking pain - 2

Physical pain or physical discomfort is inevitable in Human life.Or rather let me put it in this way physical pain is a integral way of life. Since a baby's birth to the death bed humans get some physical pain in some way or other.

Imagine you are a little baby in your mom's womb trying to push your way out to a big new world from a limited space of your mother's womb. Although mother's womb could be the coziest place in the universe;  you will have to give your everything to push yourself out to a bright airy world where the possibilities are infinite and freedom is unlimited. You always seek freedom in any level possible unless you yourself constrict your freedom in your brain or by some believe you would want to break all barriers to get freedom in anyway possible. And Freedom is almost always never Free ;

you will have to strive for it , work for it , break some paradigms ,  break some mental inhibition  and finally break some of your own ingrained beliefs to really be gaining that. And the path the freedom has almost always have a thorny path but its a very critical things to remember physical discomfort is not something that is in your body rather its always in your mind. A good majority of people can not even walk for a mile without exhausting themselves and there are huge number of people who can run ultra marathons and even run for 100 mile without feeling much of exhaustion. And more over the same person who can not run for a mile one day can run 5k the next day. We all have all that it takes in us but we do not fully conquered the command panel yet.

Its like we have been given a high power automobile or a Ferrari but we do not know how to to change gears and always drive in the first gear and then complain that the car is not fast. May be its not as simple as that our physical being are much more complex ; think of you actually have a car which have a top speed unknown but the owners manual tells you that the more faster you can drive everyday the car will achieve a higher top speed but if you do not use the car then which ever top speed you had achieved will reduce slowly. You will have to drive your body and mind as close to its limit to increase your potential or you can always not use your car to its limits and eventually lose the top speed you had achieved earlier. Moreover you body is not just a car and its will always try , act out , coax with you mind to keep you from driving it closer to its limits. It has many ammunition in its disposal like physical pain , mental pain , emotional pain , bad weather , bad feeling , not enough energy , not enough time and not enough resources .

But be assured there is no real  pain or bad things in the universe its always the interpretation that makes it bad or good. So before you can control your body you will have to conquer your mind.

Life is about Giving Joy and Taking Pain : TOC

Introduction :
Chapter 1 : What is the true meaning of human life
Chapter 2 : Success & Happiness
Chapter 3 : Perceived pain vs Actual pain
Chapter 4 : Perceived Pleasure vs actual Pleasure
Chapter 5 : Goal and the importance of it
Chapter 6 : Goal & Happiness and interconnected
Chapter 7 : Conditioning of body ,  mind and spirit for a perusal of a worthy goal
Chapter 8 : Practice & Perfection
Chapter 9 : Training and Guarding mind
Chapter 10 : Getting the best of the Now
Chapter 11 : Past is nothing but a experience
Chapter 12 : Future is what we do now
Chapter 13 : We are collectors of experience
Chapter 14 :  Give joy to get it back
Chapter 15 :  Living Life king size doing the hard things
Chapter 16 : Compassion
Chapter 17 : Giving to get the ultimate joy

Life is about giving Joy a taking pain

Recently I have been contemplating what is the true meaning of life what happens and what we make happen .What we are supposed to do in this planet where we are limited vertically by physics and in a lot other ways mentally or psychologically. I believe I found the answer to this so profound questions. But before we go there as this is a question that will poke the hornets nest surely , lets think about few very basic things. What in life is most valuable. Some might say my iphone or internet or some may say its the big home they own or a luxury car. But have anyone thought about the water they drink can someone truly live any meaningful life with a clean glass of water for more than a day. Or have anyone thought about a clean gush of fresh air they breath ; can anyone really still survive even couple of minutes without it. Probably no.May be lets think about time we only have 86k seconds a day and that is it. They are not going to get back any single second lost for any reason what so ever. Or may be a good physical health and good mental health. Without a good physical health every other material thing in the world would fade in its glory or more even a good mental health without which you will not experience anything meaningfully even if you have everything at your disposal. Have anyone thought what the the price of all these valuable things. They are priceless.
So the bottom line is in life most of the things that are priceless are free and can never have any price to it. But because they are free  we never really understand the value of it.This is a quite ironic , is not it. And we will see lot more ironic things next.

Similarly like any living organism humans try to lean towards pleasure and away from pain. There is nothing wrong in it. In fact it a very basic primordial quality which is even exhibited at any level of living hierarchy like a amoeba or a ant or even a fish. For example if you have a amoeba  in a petri dish and pass electric current or heat at one end of it the amoeba will move away from it and if you put some food source it will move towards it.However most organism move away from pain towards pleasure driven by their survival instinct.  So whats wrong it it. Humans are different however. Human have a much better memory and much better brain. We normally define pleasure not for anything related to our survival. We have conquered everything related to survival and our pleasures and pains are no longer driven our natural tendency to survive rather the pleasure is normally driven by indulgence or a non fruitful habits. For example if you ask 100 people what pleases them 90% will certainly say partying or drinking or even eating a great tasting food.  And if you ask 100 people what is pain probably most of them will say going to work  , doing chores or working out at gym  ,  run a mile or doing a creative project or any repeating thing. So what is the outcome of this type of mentality it create a bunch of over indulgent people who do not want to do much but want to have everything the world has to offer. Also not getting what they really desire like happiness and even end up losing the health. This create a burden on the society and more over burden on the planet and more over burden on them selves as pleasure is hard to achieve without a healthy mind and body.

Our true nature what we should be driven towards we really want is to experience everything but indulge in nothing material rather only indulge in something to improve internally like a skill or a mastery any specific craft of their liking or something creative or may be working out or running. We will discuss much more in detail in coming post.

There is a very well know proverb "we make the habits first then the habits make us". However only a very small fraction of people few intentionally make any habits.As habits making need discipline  and an internal drive without which when the going gets tough which will inevitably happen we will stop or even move backwards. Have you seen anyone getting younger after passing of the days. Nope. Right? We always grow older no matter if we do anything or nothing. But in the habit making process we do go backward if we do not contribute towards to goal. So we have to be very careful. Especially when the going gets tough and our motivation and desire subsides.

Peace..Calm... Be happy with what you have rather than thinking you would be happy with what you want..