If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama
I hadn't meant to leave it quite so long to update this blog (although I have been posting on one of my other blogs, Live Learn Lead, every few days). And I have been wondering whether I should combine these two blogs because learning to live, learn and lead better surely leads to greater happiness?
I had also intended to post on the theme 'The Discipline of Happiness' but I will leave that until another time as I wanted to get some thoughts down on another theme: 'The Receipt of Happiness'.
In my last post, I suggested that anyone looking for happiness is going the wrong way about it. However, because this does generally seem to be the case (people look for happiness), the commercial sector are milking the opportunity for all its worth, be it selling holidays in the sun, online dating, fashion, self-help books, quick ways to make money - or the latest gadget. All of this is promised (implicitly, if not explicitly) to make you happier.
Balderdash!
Even Zig Ziglar pithily observes: 'Money won't make you happy... but everybody wants to find out for themselves.'
Consider what actually gives you happiness (notice I use the word 'give' - you cannot actually buy happiness). And consider the occasions when you reflect on the fact that you are, in fact, happy - and what it is you are doing (not what it is you have just paid for).
First of all, happiness is not, I believe, some esoteric feeling that arises as a result of some circumstantial event - planned or unplanned. Secondly, happiness is not an occasional feeling of ecstasy but an undercurrent of contentment or fulfilment. I think Doug Larson was correct in his conclusion: 'The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.' People are missing the point and, because of that, they are missing out on happiness.
I really believe happiness is a gift - and as with all gifts, we have to open it and appreciate it. This gift is given through the interactions we have with people and through what we mean to them and they mean to us. This gift is given when we actively seek to make others happy and see the impact. The gift is given, in fact, when we give it to others. In Gretta Brooker Palmer's words: 'Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.'
However, for many of us, this gift becomes cluttered or lost or buried with the inevitable dross of live: we allow the unhappy events of life to smother the happiness of living. (More on that in another post!)
Chasing after happiness is the wrong way to go about it - and not just because it's wrong (because of social etiquette) to chase after gifts: they are a free-will extension of another's affection for us - because of what we mean to them. Chasing after happiness is like currying favour or hunting for compliments - it is meaningless, unsatisfying, demeaning - and it only makes happiness more elusive. We should, in fact, be directing our energies to making others happy - and watch for the happiness we receive in return. Who hasn't experienced happiness on seeing the smile we put on someone else's face? How did that smile get there? Not by chasing happiness, that's for sure.
I suggest that we forget about trying to be happy and try, instead, to be someone else's happiness.
I hope you are in receipt of happiness. How did that happen? On whose face have you put a smile on recently? Do you agree that happiness is an undercurrent rather than a temporal feeling? Please feel free to contribute your thoughts on this: I look forward to reading your comments.
Phil
