Probably the most challenging and satisfying accomplishment anyone can do is achieving something without negative motivation. This is the difference between well-being and getting better. In the context of this post "Well-being" is about living a healthy life. "Getting better" is about recovering from some malady.
While recovering from illness seems much better than being sick, what's best is having no ills from which we need to recover. How is that possible? In truth, it's more likely than the possibility of recovery.
For many, well-being includes things like proper nutrition, healthy exercise, being of good temper, spending time with friends and family and more. Nevertheless, many look at all the ways they could enjoy well-being as things that would "get better" if only...they had the time, weren't so tired, strapped for money, busy at work, and so on. So it seems that well-being can be rather difficult to achieve.
Our automatic system runs on lessons learned before we were old enough to concatenate them. Because many lessons are learned via negative consequence, experiencing "growth" seems to require fixing things in order to improve. Such growth is in a system of development that does not necessarily support well-being. All difficulties and disappointment are are related to "not being good enough" and that must be the case in order to get better.
Becoming aware or conscious often describes the point at which one begins to wake-up from the sleepy dream of automatic living. However, waking up is too often a temporary event that gets sucked up by the "getting better" model which means things still don't seem to improve. As long as we try to fix things nothing will ever get better. ;)
Things are different, not fixed, but altogether truly different when we stop trying to get better and start each day with the intent to be well. That is simply doing what is healthy rather than bouncing it off a mountain of things that go against it. Along with eating right, exercising, happily spend time with family and friends, or whatever you do, be lucid as you do it. Being lucid is well-being and requires no need to get better.
Try this: Review the posts tagged "Noticing the Mundane" (start at the bottom of the page and scroll up). Practice a few of the recommended techniques throughout the day. Therein lies the difference between getting stuck with a few big ticket items that need to get better and being truly well.
Be lucid!
