Happiness

Happiness is not the unalienable right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, only its pursuit is . . . the rest is up to us. So how’s that working for you?, perhaps a revealing, even invasive, question. After all, for certain personality types, the attainment of happiness might not even be the top priority, perhaps ranking a very distant second to the preservation of an ego structure.

This pursuit of happiness can itself represent a tricky question. We might start out our own pursuit by teasing out examples of a related phenomenon, the experience of awesomeness – times we were able to untangle ourselves from what we normally were not. Anglers know something about this as they experience fishing as a kind of meditation in the way it concentrates the mind while, at the same time, liberating it – less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman (MM 1/22/18 Awesomeness).

Recall the reverie, the suspension of time, how the excellence of the moment carried with it the prestige of the infinite. Surely such a state of mind can be replicable. The focus need not be limited to some signature event, say the birth of one’s child, to clear the general clutter.

The open mindset is less about addition than it is about subtraction, starting with the elimination of those things which hi-jack our attention including the insidious way the general and social media “industry” serves up outrage and bias confirmation over things we can’t control. Interruptions interrupting interruptions that perpetually divert the mind’s steady gaze away from the present moment.

And so it is with our attachments, of what you worship: if it’s to money and things, you will never have enough; if it’s to body and beauty and sexual allure, you will die a million deaths as you age; if it’s to power, you will feel weak and afraid; if it’s to intellect, you will end up feeling a fraud, always on the verge of being found out (MM 12/6/21 Ego Is the Enemy).

Once cleared, the mind then becomes open to happiness. We might share candidates for meditative focus. They certainly could be grand in scope.

But the secret sauce served up by the author of our discussion piece is the realization, after 80 years, that it’s an awareness of the small things. The tiny scenes. They exist everywhere. (What Makes Me Happy Now).

Paraphrasing: it all exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach, something you glimpse at in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it, and before you’ve had time to take a big grasp and name it, it’s gone. The author would "settle for small, random stabs of extreme 'interestingness' -- moments of intense awareness of the things I'm about to lose, and of gladness that they exist."

So it's simple awareness – we need only to meditate on the habit of catching glimpses of the little things – and, for that, it just comes down to: you, a chair, and a blank wall.

The chair is optional.