Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form
Thich Nhat Hanh
A lot of thunderstorms these days in Ireland
The Buddha often used images to try to convey some of this sense of all appearances arising, with nothing we can hold on to. He said life is like a rainbow, an echo, a dream, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, a flash of lightning in a summer sky.
What does a deeper glimpse into this truth of change offer us, ultimately? We see that there is a tender, exultant beauty to every hour, in fact to every minute we have just because we are alive. ..The fragility and dynamism of life is what makes it so vital. Every experience, every encounter, every realized desire, and every unfulfilled longing that comes into our lives is moving, changing…
Life is short, and it is sacred
Sharon Salzberg, Real LIfe: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom
This is where we run into trouble in terms of being fulfilled… You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are.
Your job isn’t going to make you happy, your spouse isn’t going to make you happy, the weather isn’t going to make you happy… You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success… You have to be able to create your own happiness, period.
Jonathan Fields, American author, in interview with Debbie Millman on the GoodLIfe Project
From the great Suzuki Roshi. A lot to ponder here but I do like the idea of seeing all that happens as an unfolding of big mind:
Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind,
we do not care for any excessive joy.
So we have imperturbable composure.
Shunryu Suzuki Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,
At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is.
Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. …
This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.
John Welwood
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
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