Let the NEW in...

You can't be happy while your heart's on the roam, You can't be happy until you bring it home." The Brothers Four

"The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine." Mike Murdock.

We can easily get excited when something new or someone new comes into our lives. New relationships forged for different reason and it opens up new horizons and amazing experiences for us. Of course there are typical causes for these new emotions that significantly change our situation and our lives. 


Our lives consists of daily routines that we are used to doing. We convince ourselves that we are happy and okay but really we need something to change because we are drowning. So, when new relation/friendships come into our lives we are hungry for it. It could be a new friend, an old friend returning and/or a new love interest. So, we see these new caring and loving relationships grow into new experiences and short term or long term happiness depends on our ability to enjoy something new - which makes us realize that not everything in our lives have to be routine. We can live in the moment and enjoy a relation/friendship for as long as we can. How can we do this?

One of the key elements is to believe in yourself, believe that you are worth something better and not take others for granted. So, to answer the question you have to keep making change to your life even when you think you cannot move on. Be opened to change because to be truthful you cannot change your fate. People come into our lives for a reason, though we may not know why. It at times could very well hurt us or it could be the best thing that ever happen to us.


Some of our daily routines have to do with regular life, while our daily relation/friendships may cause be wonderful or they can be awful. As much as we want to change our home life, we do not know how. Perhaps, we are so lost that if we can not focus on them it will just go away. But in the end we need to face what goes on in our own house.

Everyday we keep ourselves busy with household chores and work. We go to work or do spring cleaning, get rid of all the junk in the garage, pay bills and cleaning the house so that we can just get through the days. But soon we realize that we need more, want more and desire to escape our lives that pains us. 

An extrinsically valuable activity is a means to an external goal, the value lies in achieving that goal. We do not value these activities in themselves. In fact, we may even resent performing them, as they are painful and costly. We still engage in such activities when the external goal is perceived to be beneficial. In an intrinsically valuable activity, our interest is focused upon the activity itself, not its results.

An essential aspect of happiness is the presence of intrinsically valuable activities in one's life.  In a any relationship, it is not necessarily the nature of the activity that renders its activity intrinsically valuable, but the fact that it is performed by people together. In light of the great significance that we all share together have a meaningful and satisfied life, the value of routine and novel activities in our life should be determined, among other things, by their intrinsic value.


Our wants, needs and desires is a never ending process. We want to be happy, we need to be loved and we desire to be important by others. So, from time to time we give into something new or someone new so that we can just matter, again. So, that we are not alone. We enjoy our friends and we open ourselves to new changes.


If we consider that intellectual thinking or moral behavior is essential to our human identity, we cannot say that at a certain point in our life we finish hoping that all of the bad will come to an end and only good things will happen to us. From time to time we stop believing that we are worth something good and we start to believe the worse in ourselves. But there are moments in our life that makes us feel the opposite because of the people or change that comes into our lives. These activities are profound in the sense that they are essential to what we characterize as a flourishing human life.

The ongoing and never ending nature of our needs add value and is compatible with routine. But not all routine are intrinsically valuable. But that cannot be the sole or even the main factor in achieving a profoundly satisfied life. Something else must be added. It is the want and desire to change all the bad that rips us apart. 

A distinction can be drawn between superficial pleasure and profound satisfaction. Superficial pleasure is an immediately rewarding, relatively short-lived experience requiring few or no profound human capacities. Profound satisfaction involves optimal functioning, using and developing the agent's essential capacities and attitudes. Part of profound satisfaction is the ability to overcome problems and make some progress. The optimal functioning of human beings differs from the minimal functioning of animals, which involves mere contentment or relaxation.

When we consider the people who are valuable for our own sake, the relation/friendship is pleasant and we enjoy the time we have with them. It seems then that the fact that an activity is novel or is pleasant-both of these are characteristic of change-is not sufficient for it to be an intrinsically valuable activity; hence such activities are no guarantee of either long-term happiness or long-term profound change. You can be engage in the same activity yet find it continually interesting because of the nature of the activity and your attitude toward it.

Now that you have opened yourself to change you can keep going to dinner or a movie with your new friends or old ones and still find it interesting and pleasant because of the very fact that you are together. Something does not have to be completely novel in order to remain interesting and valuable. This is true both in terms of having the same friends and having the new friends.

As each of us have our own value and we will find that repeated exposure to the experience in no way reduces their sense of its complexity and their consequent interest in it. Such repeated experiences are not regarded as boring or routine actions, but rather as deeper and more complex encounters with all of the people in our lives, both new and old. Each person who becomes apart of our lives, add value because we value them.

It is easy to be excited by new relation/friendships, as the excitement stems more from the very fact of the change in your life and not from the intrinsic value of the given activity. If we can enjoy the new routine, it means that the people in question are of great value in themself and not merely because it is new. Profound relation/friendship can be routine and still enjoyable, but not all routines can be changed unless you want them to. 

Milky