A lot of what people call the blessings of life are nice to have. And when these come to you, it's appropriate to be grateful. It makes sense to smile when they arrive. But they're extras. You'll take them when they come. You'd be a fool not to. But do you need them for happiness? No.
It's not about a colorful and convincing resume. It's not about the temperature of the house in winter. It's not about knowing for sure if there is or isn't a God. Again, it's not about being right. No, it's definitely not about being right.
So what is the stuff then? What's happiness?
Well one thing's for sure it's experienced in the now only. It's receptivity now. It's generosity now. It's allowing someone else's pain to touch you now. It's that red and yellow leaf falling with such grace and unconcern and beauty now. It's the touch of reassurance from your friend right now. It's listening to that music right now, not just on the surface, but as deep down as the music goes. Oh gosh yes, it's about depths. It's about paying attention to how deep down and how far back you yourself go—the wisdom that you've accumulated over the years, the experiences you've had. It's about respecting your own mind. It's about reverence for your own life and for the lives of all living things.
It's about trying. It's about taking the risk. It's about saying yes, but often enough it's also about saying no. It's about accepting other people's answers (yes or no) with equanimity and poise. It's about living in your body. It's about taking the time. It's about praying if it's in you to pray. It's about crying if it's in you to cry. It's about allowing your life to contradict itself sometimes. It's about letting yourself lie back on this or that paradox of existence, the way that you can float on water if you just lie back. It's about a golden pear in the hand, ripe and curved and full of an understood sweetness. It's about biting in now and tasting. It's about the thought that the kingdom of heaven is something that can be known now, like that pear; and by the way all the wisest people who have ever lived seem to agree on that, East or West.
Happiness is about traveling between your heart and anothers. Your mind and another's. Your soul and another's. Your well-being and another's. It's about dying into the distances between you. According to the poet William Blake, it's about dying many little deaths each day for the sake of another.
In general, your happiness shouldn't depend on the attitude of others toward you. It shouldn't depend on the vagaries of fate. If it does, then your happiness is poorly grounded. Its foundation is inadequate. Even cracked.
In general, happiness is probably what you're feeling when you're most free of the question of happiness and how to achieve it. It's probably something that can't really be achieved at all.
And yet it's not wholly a gift either. It requires a certain consciously chosen attitude of inner attenuation. You aim yourself like an antenna to receive it. Or it's like the fisherman throwing the fly in just the right place in the stream where the fishes are going to be biting, but without really trying either, just knowing, just doing.
Some people will say happiness is a shallow thing to pursue, or too vague in definition to care about. But I say it's maybe neither shallow nor deep, and that we know it well enough when we see it, and that yes, it has something to say about us. Let's not call it a destination. Let's say it's more like a measure of your speed. Or your direction of travel. Let's say that it's just one means of many to give you a read on how you're proceeding. Where you are in life. What you're about. Where you ought to be going.
Certainly it is not everything, happiness. It may be in fact that our expertise in the field of feeling grief is every bit as vital to our depth as human beings.
HB
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