The Courage to be Happy: True Contentment Is In Your Power

by Ichiro Kishimi

‘Respect denotes the ability to see a person as he is; to be aware of his unique individuality.’

The Latin respicio, which is the root of ‘respect’, has the connotation of ‘seeing’.

In this world, no matter how powerful one is, there are two things that cannot be forced.

‘Respect’ and ‘love’.

YOUR ‘NOW’ DECIDES THE PAST

History is a grand story that is continually manipulated by the powers that be of the time. It is always manipulated with great skill on the basis of the logic of the powerful that says, ‘It is I who am just.’ All chronologies and history books are apocrypha compiled for the purpose of proving the legitimacy of those currently in power. In history, it is always the ‘now’ that is the most correct, and whenever one authority is overthrown, a new ruler will rewrite the past again. But they will do so only for the purpose of explaining their own legitimacy. So ‘the past’, in the most basic sense of the word, does not exist. YOUTH: But . . . PHILOSOPHER: For example, suppose an armed group of a certain country is planning a coup d’état. If they are suppressed and the

attempt ends in failure, they will be defamed in the history books as traitors. On the other hand, if the coup d’état succeeds and the government is overthrown, their names will be remembered in history as heroes who took a stand against tyranny. YOUTH: Because history is something that is always rewritten by the victor? PHILOSOPHER: It is the same with us as individuals. Every person is a compiler of a story of ‘me’ who rewrites his or her own past as desired to prove the legitimacy of ‘me now’.

Was one bitten by a dog? Or was one helped by another person? The reason Adlerian psychology is considered a ‘psychology of use’ is this aspect of ‘being able to choose one’s own life’. The past does not decide ‘now’. It is your ‘now’ that decides the past.

I repeat, the past does not exist. The past you speak of is nothing more than a story skilfully compiled by ‘you now’. Please understand this point.

Suppose, for example, a person who says ‘I like flowers’, but lets them wither right away. This person forgets to water them, doesn’t think of transplanting them into a different pot or adjusting the amount of light, and just puts the flowerpot in a place where they look nice. To be sure, it may be true that the person likes looking at flowers. But one could not say that this person loves flowers. Love is a more dedicated approach. It is the same with you. You were avoiding the responsibility that should be shouldered by the one who loves. You just devoured the fruit of your passion, without watering the flowers or planting the seeds. That is truly a fleeting, hedonistic love.

Adler did not hope for his psychology to become didactically fixed in place and passed down only among specialists. His hope was that his psychology would be positioned as a psychology for everyone and continue to thrive, far from the world of academia, as a common sense of the people. We are not a religion endowed with eternal scriptures. And Adler is not our sacred founder, but a philosopher who existed on the same level as us. Times change. New arts are born, new relationships and new worries also. The common sense of the people undergoes a slow transformation in tandem with the changing times. It is precisely because we value Adler’s ideas that we must continue to update them. We must not turn into fundamentalists. This is the mission entrusted to the human beings who will live in the new era.