It’s a sheer joy and brings great freedom to know that your happiness comes from within yourself and not from any outer source – but it can also be a tad daunting. What if you believe a relationship with the ‘right’ person can make you happy? What if you think the perfect job/career, home, environment etc will bring you lasting happiness?
Sadly, there are countless people who do actually live their whole lives believing that they’ll be happier, less stressed and more at peace when they just manage to get ………………., whatever it is they’re wanting and placing their future happiness on.
Jon Kabat Zinn, US Professor and Master of Mindfulness, wrote ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are’, a highly recommended book to better understand why other people and things don’t bring us eternal happiness.
Everything changes, that’s a definite. People we love leave us – either by change of situations or by death. We highly desire a new home and what we believe will be a better environment or we go for that awesome new job with higher pay, but I’m sure you relate – when we eventually get these things, are we truly and permanently happy? Of course not. All it takes to destroy our happiness is for that person we’ve placed so many conditions upon to do something we don’t like or don’t approve of and boom – happiness disintegrated. Plus if they say or do things we don’t like often enough, we become sure they’re not the right person for us and off we go, looking for someone we think will be better.
The job we were so excited about often disappoints when we find the boss or co-workers don’t measure up to how we thought they would or should be. We spend our waking hours fretting and worrying because it’s not working out the way we thought it would. Happiness – gone.
The house we just had to have might be nice to live in but are we totally happy? Just because we live somewhere we like doesn’t mean we’re happy. There’s a lot of people living in their dream homes who are unhappy.
‘Wherever you go, there you are’ – it’s up to us to choose to learn how to be happy as if we are all we have – which is true. What happens when you’re alone? Can you sit with yourself quietly, without outer distractions and just be. Do you feel at peace, quietly happy and like who you are?
So if other people and stuff don’t make you permanently, blissfully happy, what does?
Could it be religion, politics, power, authority, wealth? Absolutely not. There are millions of people in these positions all over the world who are miserably unhappy.
Of course, it’s great to have happy relationships, a nice home or car, satisfying job or career path and financial security but the danger arises when we believe any or all of these things will be the complete answer to our lack of happiness. These things may bring us (temporary) feelings of excitement and joy but if we’re attached to them as our source of happiness and how we think things and people should be, this usually brings suffering, the opposite to happiness. Choosing to be happy, regardless of what you think is going ‘right’ in your life, or not, brings humble gratitude and peace of mind.
Philosophers since the very early days of civilisation have talked about the value of quiet time in order to know yourself better and become the best person you can be. If you spend time daily in meditation and quiet contemplation, you’ll find more peace as you go through life and it’s only through discovering inner peace that we find true and lasting happiness, then, Every Day Gets Better.
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