Category: Look for Happiness

What happiness is not

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We tend to equate happiness with two things, pleasure and lack of tension. Hence we fantasize that for us to be happy we would need to be in a situation within which we would be free of all the tensions that normally flood into our lives from: pressure, tiredness, interpersonal friction, physical pain, financial worry, disappointment in our jobs, frustration with our churches, frustration with our favorite sports teams, and every other headache and heartache that can appear. Happiness, as it is superficially conceived of, means perfect health, perfectly fulfilled relationships, a perfect job, no anxiety or tension in life, no disappointments, and the time and money to enjoy the good life.

But that isn’t what constitutes happiness. Meaning is what constitutes happiness and meaning isn’t contingent upon pain and tension being absent from our lives. C.S. Lewis taught that happiness and unhappiness color backwards: If our lives end up happy, we realize that we have always been happy even through the trying times, just as if our lives end up unhappy we realize that we have always been unhappy, even during the pleasurable periods of our lives. Where we end up ultimately in terms of meaning will determine whether our lives have been happy or unhappy. Happiness has a lot more to do with meaning than with pleasure.

Ron Rolheiser, Meaning and Happiness.

Love and risk

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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that  casket –  safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S. Lewis, The Fours Loves

Patience and appreciation

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It does not astonish or make us angry that it takes a whole year to bring into the house three great white peonies and two pale blue iris.  It seems altogether right and appropriate that these glories are earned with long patience and faith. . . . and also that it is altogether right and appropriate that they cannot last. Yet in our human relations we are outraged when the supreme moments, the moments of flowering, must be waited for. . . . and then cannot last. We reach a summit, and then have to go down again.

May Sarton

Early morning freshness: Keeping the question open

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Don’t carry away a conclusion unless it has been arrived at through your direct experience.

Rather, if there hasn’t been direct experience, carry away the question.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

Finding a partner within

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Jung writing here – beautifully – on the slow, lifelong process of individuation and how it means a deep befriending of all the parts of ourself and our life story. It is what we are learning as we “stay” in meditation, becoming more and more at ease with the divisions within ourselves. It reminds us that we move towards the full potential of our own maturity through the struggles of life and that we can get “lost” many times along the way.   To become fully ourselves means that we pass through these numerous “psychic transformations” and finally come to see that the happiness we were seeking for all along is based on what is already present within us and a reconciliation with what has made us who we are.

It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among … his psychic transformations, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.  In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvest.

Jung, Mysterium coniunctionis

Setting an intention for this day

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I have noticed that folks are generally as happy

as they make up their minds to be

Abraham Lincoln