What is Normal & Healthy?

     When we feel anxious, down, hungry, lacking, crappy, etc, we quickly do our best to feel normal, well, good or healthy again. If we're told "but that's just the way life is", we reject this, finding such sentiments defeatist, even repugnant. So most of us work hard, pretty well constantly, trying to control or optimize the infinite number & variety of externals that impact our lives. Nevertheless, we still feel anxious, down, hungry, lacking, crappy, etc. And we judge the fact that we're not consistently happy as unacceptable, even abnormal! So we have rapidly rising rates of mental illness, prescription- & illicit drug & alcohol abuse in North America. 

      The Buddha, despite being born a healthy, wealthy, intelligent, powerful prince, with everything the world could provide at his fingertips, realized that life was basically stressful, unsatisfactory and uncontrollable. 
     His concept of “dukkha (refers to) stress, suffering, misery, unsatisfactoriness, pain: literally, ‘hard to endure, difficult to bear.’
      In its limited sense, dukkha is the quality of experience that results when the mind is conditioned ... into craving, attachment, egoism, and selfishness. This feeling takes on forms such as disappointment, dissatisfaction, frustration, agitation, anguish, dis-ease, despair – from the crudest to the subtlest levels.
      In its universal sense, dukkha is the inherent condition of unsatisfactoriness, ugliness, and misery in all impermanent, conditioned things. This second fundamental characteristic is the result of anicca; impermanent things cannot satisfy our wants and desires no matter how hard we try (and cry). The inherent decay and dissolution of things is misery.”
       Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. “Mindfulness with Breathing. A Manual for Serious Beginners.” Wisdom Publications, 1988.

      So, at the very least, we might wish to consider Western psychology's well-established warnings about perfectionism: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=perfectionism
     There's much truth in JFK's famous saying: "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask 'why not?'" 
     At the same time, it's wise to consider how minimal our individual input is, relative to the infinite variety & number of inputs that condition every event, person & thing. In other words, we have far less control over external events, including other people's behavior, than we'd like. Nor is it realistic or helpful take this personally - it's just one of the many laws of nature, like gravity, with which we must learn to work wisely. So constant dissatisfaction with the way things are, and constant striving to alter the flow of reality are futile, frustrating & self-destructive. Whereas accepting reality as it is, and ourselves as we are, is the hallmark of sanity, and the essential starting point for initiating realistic change. 
     So, when we feel anxious, down, hungry, lacking, crappy, etc, instead of our unhelpful reactivity, we might be wiser to 'lean into' and deeply investigate what's actually going on.

Studying the laws of the universe