Tag: Joy

Do not prepare your joys

Karl Duffy3 Comments

The passion in this quote is striking. Each moment is there to be seized, to be discovered in all its depths. We can miss out if we spend our time anticipating moments of happiness elsewhere, or in the future. Indeed, too much focus on our aspirations for our future, our self-development and career paths, can create pressure and lead us into a habit of leaning away from this moment. Often all it succeeds in doing is making us unhappy with who we are.

Seize from each moment

its unique novelty

and do not prepare your joys.

André Gide

Looking for treasure outside ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We can spend a good portion of our life waiting for some time in the future when we have the time to do the things we want, or the things we feel are good for us. We look forward to our holidays, or to weekend seminars or to doing a course, believing that then we will finally get it together. It is rare that things actually happen in this way. The conditions are already available to us, in the moments of each day. We can start with where we are, not matter how messy that is, or how distracted we feel.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your own dwelling, as by staying within.  Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future.  Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

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.

More on Pausing

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If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves.  Pausing is very helpful in this process. It creates a momentary contrast between being completely self-absorbed and being awake and present. You just stop for a few seconds, breathe deeply, and move on. In the middle of just living, which is usually a pretty caught-up experience characterized by a lot of internal discussion, you just pause.

Pema Chodron, The Power of the Pause, O Magazine

Open to us now

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The seed of suffering in you may be strong,

but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Dealing with reality, step by step

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What is actually important is here and now. Now is definitely now. There’s no point in thinking that the past that exists  we could have now. This is now. This very moment. Nothing mystical, just now, very simple and straightforward. From that nowness however, arises a sense of intelligence, always, that you are constantly interacting with the reality, one by one, spot by spot, constantly. We actually experience fantastic precision, always. But we are threatened by the now so we jump to the past or the future. That’s the problem. And that is not trusting the nowness properly. Now possesses a lot of powerful things. It is so powerful that we can’t face it, therefore we have to borrow from the past to invite the future, all the time

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche