If you win the lottery, tell no one

 

People have a funny way of destroying sacred things. 

This goes for inner peace as well. Have you ever heard of, or read, or watched the movie based on the work "The Secret Garden"? 

If so, well, it's been my experience that life has many secret gardens. I remember when I found a girl I thought I could trust, who I thought would stay with me forever. 

Well that girl destroyed not one but many of my secret gardens. These were places of refuge away from the storms. These were magical little glowing universes. 

The first and most noticeable of these secret gardens was a little Chinese house church I used to attend. They had something going for them. A real sense of wonder and specialness and I once even cried there during a sermon. That place is no more now. The big megachurches turned it into something else. 

But before the megachurches took away their purity and beauty, my - at the time, new- girlfriend dragged me away from the Saturday worship sessions and then that was the end of their trust. They never really saw me the same way again, that church. I'd broken something sacred in them too.

And as for my girlfriend, it was my reverence she took away, and she replaced it with something new and sparkly. I recall that one fateful night when she said she wanted to go to the movies, and I said I couldn't because I had to attend the Saturday church meeting. But then I flic-flacked and I went with her in the end.

Well that's when my life changed for the worse, and when something sacred was taken away from me. A sense of inner peace I've not had back for 2 years and a bit. Sure, there's been fun and sex and excitement, but I haven't had peace. And peace is the foundation for lasting joy.

The same goes for all things in life. If you find the secret sauce, in terms of real beauty or some untainted joy, or even a business plan, just know it probably won't be there forever. People have a way of needling their way in and taking it. 

In a recent YouTube interview between Dr Jordan Peterson and Robert Greene, it struck me how little Jordan Peterson understood about the world's tendency to destroy the empathetic or kind man, and replace his joy with a fist full of dirt. 

At the beginning of the interview, he said to Greene, who authored such books as The 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of Seduction  that he was really quite shocked by his books and couldn't understand where he was coming from in them. Greene explained that he'd had a vast number of different jobs in his life, and that in each instance, it was the most manipulative - and that was usually the most assertive person - who got their way. Everyone else was pretty much doomed. 

Peterson did however, mention an example of a study that went towards Greene's point: He said that even if there was a large group of empaths, the study only required the introduction of one psychopath to change the dynamic to one of chaos and calamity. 

Apart from that though, there was no point at which Peterson really seemed to click and say "Ah, yes. I know what you mean. Life is full of people who want to rip the stuffing out of a nice thing." Because in my experience that's really what happens.